


Borrowing Privileges

by afogocado



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Dry Humping, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Humor, Kissing, Mutual Pining, Professor!Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon is Obi-Wan’s adopted father, Sex, Slow Burn, Unprotected Sex, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:14:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 54,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24244111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afogocado/pseuds/afogocado
Summary: Modern!AU and College/University!AU in which DFAB/Female!Reader is a graduate student who works at her university’s library that our dear Obi-Wan Kenobi professes at. This is a slow burn that will be a friends-to-lovers kind of thing. And, of course, eventual smut.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Reader, Obi-Wan Kenobi/You
Comments: 160
Kudos: 500





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: Violence in that the reader is harassed by a creepy dude at the bar she’s at, and Obi-Wan has to punch him. But the rest is humor and fluff.
> 
> I don't own Star Wars or anything recognizable.

Borrowing Privileges

\--

“And all I wanna know  
Is just how far you wanna go.  
I wanna make it my business  
I wanna tolerate drunk you, honey  
I wanna make you my problem.”

-‘Business’, Catfish and the Bottlemen

\--

1

They’d dragged you out yet again, saying something like you needed attention from someone new and perhaps for just one night. No names, no numbers. _Some friends_ , but they meant well you supposed. Well, it was easier to assume good will for the people you lived with and were going through school with. Its always easier to go along with what your roommates wanted to do, you figured out—luckily—sooner rather than later. It saved you from a lot of awkward questions and observations: _you stay in your room too much; the library is the only other place you go to apart from class and you work there!; you should spend more of your free time doing fun things or you’ll regret your time in school._ Fun things. Well, you’d had that in your undergraduate years and now it was time to be more serious as a master’s student. But that excuse only worked for so many semesters and was quickly drying out—you were now in the final one and working through thesis guidance, which meant no more dedicated class time. But it was easier, still, to fib about writing (and not actually doing it) in the library during your free time than to tell them you just didn’t want to be around them. Or around anyone, really.

So it was karaoke, as it always was: show tunes and obnoxious bridal bachelorette parties like it always would be; sickening and too loud Disney duets; gross, bright aquamarine Jell-O shots that were always suspiciously a dollar, when they were at least three at other watering holes.

Your friends drank (pregaming, they called it) prior to arriving to the karaoke bar so they’d spend less money on drinking out. These were always the famous last words because they almost always ended up drinking far too much anyway and embarrassing themselves. Sometimes you had to drink double time to get on their level so you’d feel less embarrassed too. Throughout the night you took their drink orders (and leaving them on their respective tabs) finding some solace in leaving the too loud room filled with inebriated singers. But that solace was soon gone when the man you caught staring at you upon your arrival had not left and was hovering around the pool tables and made a staggered beeline to you at the bar for your third trip. A frustrated sound comes from the pool tables signaling an angry defeat and you see a man a bit you ger than your sordid admirer, dressed in skinny light washed jeans a white t shirt and oversized navy cardigan lay down the borrowed cue stick and all but follow your admirer to the bar.  
  


“Hey” the older man starts, leaning into you, but is cut off with a polite:

  
  
“Pardon me” from the pool winner.

He looks down at you, his cerulean eyes searching your face, trying to communicate something and you just shake your head. He orders a water and the man on his other side goes away leaving you alone.

  
You gather up this round’s drinks and the blue-eyed man watches you leave the room.

  
Your friends all take their respective drinks from you and give slight thanks when one of the girls, Rachel, is upset with your talk about wanting to go home.

  
“Lets just stay for a few more songs,” she says. You groan inwardly and want to tell her that’s what she said almost twelve songs ago. “I think we’re next.” Another set of famous last words—your group was never next.  
  
“We?” You groan outwardly this time. The sounds of ‘Gangstas Paradise’ is loud, making you sweat in this room filled with damp bodies and terrible breath. The dark room with sickly green and purple lighting is giving you the start to a migraine.  
  
“Yeah, I signed all of us up to go sing One Direction. It’s a group song. It’ll be fun!” She’s almost begging, and that makes it worse.  
  
“I’m not drunk enough to sing.” You protest.  
  
But _they_ are, and Rachel is persistent, “Come on, you can just be background.”  
  
Then you think of a plan. It’s almost cruel, but you’re all out way later than they said you would be, and you have to work in the morning. “Let me go get another drink and I’ll be back up.”  
  
Rachel cheers, obnoxiously, and you go back to the bar side of the place and sit on one of the stools, counting the next song as about three more away from your debut. You tell the bartender that you want to close your tab, and want a Sprite to sip on while you poke around on your phone until you order a Lyft. It isn’t too far away, which feels like a miracle. It should be here right before you have to go on stage.

When you look up at the bartender holding your card and ticket to sign, he also presses a shot in your hand. The tequila smell is strong and the yellow liquid makes your stomach curl with bad memories of low intolerance and inexperienced drinking from your younger years. Your _fun_ years. You open your mouth to protest, to say something about how this isn’t what you ordered, but the bartender tells you it’s from that same guy from earlier who’s now watching you from  
his end of the bar.

You sign the receipt and hand it back, stuffing your card into your front pocket and take the shot with you. You sit it down on the counter in front of the man perched unsteadily on a wobbly stool, “Thank you, but no thanks. I don’t want this. Goodnight.”

  
And you step out into the early morning chill, staring at your phone, watching the little car on the Lyft map make a wrong turn.

You feel your soul try to leave your body when a hand grabs at the back of your hair and gives a hard tug, “You should be a little more grateful when a gentleman orders you a drink.”

  
You pull yourself away and go to yell for help when someone else is saying, “And you should be more understanding when a lady tells you no. Several times.”

  
It’s the man—the pool winner—from earlier, and now you know for sure that _he’s_ been watching you all night, too. But not in the same way.

  
“So you’re going home with her, then, pretty boy?” He pushes the taller man square in the chest and the force knocks his hair into his face when he stumbles back. The creeper goes to punch the pool winner, but he dodges it and takes a swing of his own. It lands, hard, right in the nose with a sickening crack and squelch. The creeper doubles over holding his nose in both hands before all but snarling ‘ _fuck you_ ’ to you and the now fight winner before slinking off in the other direction.  
  


“Are you all right?” Your prize fighter asks, shaking his hand out with a hiss before cradling it in his other hand.

  
You didn’t notice you were trembling and clutching your phone to your chest until he places a tentative hand—the unhurt one—on your forearm. “It’s okay. You’re okay. I can call the police.”

  
“N-no,” you say too quickly and his look of concern still hasn’t ebbed. “But thank you.” You sigh sharply and hear the unsteadiness in your voice. You force a laugh, “If I weren’t such a feminist, I’d call you my guardian angel.”

  
“If I were less of a feminist, I wouldn’t admit that was a lucky shot.” He laughs in a self-deprecating manner and moves a bit closer in the darkness to look at you earnestly. And you know why he’s moved closer. He’s examining you. “I’m not much of a brawler. But I _do_ come here sometimes to keep an eye on students who get separated from their pack. Like you.” He offers a small genuine smile. “Do you need a ride home? I haven’t drank anything. Or I can walk you. Or wait with you until your friends come out?” He looks over his shoulder at the darkened doorstep, as though expecting them all to rush out to you. “Or—”

  
The list could have gone on, but you interrupt him and tell him you’re waiting on a Lyft.  
  


“I could ride with you and wait until you get home and lock the door?”

  
You’ve had far too many experiences with strange men, especially tonight, but there was such a kindness in his eyes and a calm that has swept over you that when you see the Lyft’s headlights brighten his face and the almost paternal concern etched into his few lines you say yes.  
  


When you get to the house you share with your roommates, he tells the driver to wait for him while he walks you to your front door.

  
  
“This is my number,” he says tapping on his phone, and Ben Kenobi’s contact information is airdropped onto yours. “Text me the fare and I’ll pay you back. It’ll be a bit more expensive since he’s making an extra stop with me and I live further away from here.” He watches you nod at your phone, and his hand is on your arm again and you look up at him. “Are you going to be all right?” His eyebrows are furrowed almost too deeply.  
  
“Yes. Thank you.” You turn your key in the front door and are stepping into the light.  
  
“ _Text_ me,” he implores. “Okay?”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
But you already know you won’t as you watch him curl his open cardigan around his body a bit tighter when the wind picks up, and he ducks into theLlyft with a small final wave.

2

A stack of books is coming towards where you’re sitting at the library’s main circulation desk, and you don’t know how the person behind them managed to come down four flights of steps with then, and avoid a deadly collision. But, the library is almost always dead with foot traffic on Sunday afternoons, and especially _lazy_ Sunday afternoons like this with all the rain and gray.

You see wavy and messy reddish blonde hair over the tops and by the time the books are sat down you can’t believe who’s carrying them, but you know should have expected this because of the type of luck you have.

“Hello, there,” he says, his voice rumbling from his chest and echoing softly in the overly empty room. He pushes his hair back with both hands and it smooths down to something a bit more orderly and familiar to the way it looked the other night. “You never texted me the taxi bill.”

“Lyft,” is all you can manage to say because you’re embarrassed about Friday night all of a sudden.

“Ah yes that one. Well,” he straightens out the stack of books in front of him, “you never texted me the _Lyft_ bill.” He digs into his back pocket and brings out his phone, flipping the brown faux-leather flap open and fingering through the selection of cards tucked inside.

“Are,” you clear your throat, “are you returning or checking out?”

“I’m checking out.”

“Okay.” And you busy yourself with pulling the books to yourself rather than look at his intense cerulean eyes.

Your desk mate looks up from their graphic novel (they’ve been devouring that instead if the term paper they’ve been complaining about for days) and says, “Oh, what’s up, Professor Kenobi.”

He offers a quiet, “Helloooo,” with a slight singsong lilt. 

Your coworker tells you they’re off to grab a coffee and you’re sure they’ll be gone a while and return in time to clock out. Other than that, the three of you were the only ones on this floor in the library. Such is the case for Sundays. 

You say bye to your coworker, but they already have their Air Pods in and when you look back at this one Professor Kenobi, he’s holding his university ID card out to you, amusement swirling in his eyes at the laugh lines in his cheeks. His sweater cuffs are pulled up past his wrists and you can almost count the swath of freckles on the backs of his hands. 

You look at the name and photo on the ID, then back up to him, and your own amusement curls around your mouth. “ _You_ ,” you say accusingly, looking up at him from under your eyelashes,

He raises his eyebrow, presses a hand to his chest, and smiles softly and mouths, ‘what?’.

“You told me that your name is Ben.”

“It is!” He cries and furrows his brow in feigned indignation. He goes to take his ID card from you but you’re too quick and snatch it further away from him.

You squint at his name printed in an official white font, “Not according to this.” You tap the ‘O.’ monogram in front of his middle name. Which you think is strange that it’s just ‘Ben’ instead of ‘Benjamin’ or ‘Bennett’ or something fuller and proper. “Ooooh,” you coo in a scandalized and conspiratorial way that he all but blushes at, “Or is this not really you?” You tap the photo where he’s got a buzzcut of sorts, “Doesn’t look like you,” you frown and waggle your eyebrows at him.

“No, I’ve grown up since then. That photo was taken ages ago.”

“Then what’s your real name?” You go back to the mysterious ‘O.’ just staring up at you.

He bites at his bottom lip in an attempt to stop smiling. “Have a guess.”

“There aren’t that many options with this particular letter...” you ponder aloud, staring at his picture in the frame. It was quite adorable.

“Oh, you’ve plenty, young one.” His voice is finally lowered, not that it matters since its just the two of you now. Something pulls and flushes between your stomach and core.

Your tongue darts across your lips to steady the tremor threatening to escape from them, guess something you know isn’t correct. But you like the dance occurring now, and want him to stay. If just a few moments longer. “Oscar.”

He chuckles, “I’m afraid not.” He looks down at you in between taking photos of the books in his stack one by one in a way to remember what he’d like to get once he’s allowed to check things out again. “You’ll never guess it, my dear.” This he says, almost to himself.

“Oswald,” you offer.

This gets him to stop snapping photos and makes him laugh hard, almost all of his teeth showing in his open grin. “Why on earth?”

“It’s a beloved family name. But you don’t care for it much because all the other kids used to tease you for it back when you were children. So you go by ‘Oz’ to your friends.”

“Clever, and heart wrenching backstory.” _Snap._ “But no.”

“Ozymandias,” you guess, watching his long fingers flip another book open, searching for bibliography notes. He sneaks a glance before tracing his finger along the page again while you explain, “Your parents were as pedantic as you. Their little ‘Ozzie’.”

“Cheeky.” _Snap._ “Wrong again.”

“Othello.”

“They weren’t _that_ pedantic.”

“Well, that’s all I can think of. I told you there aren’t many names that begin with ‘O’.”

“And I think I told you that you would be very surprised, young one.” He sighs, closing the final book and pushes the stack towards you with his head bowed as though going all in in a poker hand.

You stop with the name trouble, and swipe his card through the doohickey at the side of the computer and frown once his account is pulled up. “Uh oh.”

“Uh oh?” he echoes, and it you almost laugh but stop yourself. The news he’s about to receive is usually something that makes faculty see red when they can’t get what they want.

“I’m sorry, Professor Kenobi, but your account is locked.” Gone is the playful mirth from earlier—this is Assistant Librarian you.

“What? Do I have too many things checked out? This is a university library, you know.”

“You have an outstanding balance of $3,000.”

“But the library’s free!” He leans onto his forearms, hands flat against the counter, and leers at you playfully. “I don’t believe you.”

And you do something mindless after turning your screen slightly so he can see it, too. You tug at his sleeve and he drops to his elbows, stomach flat against the counter, face close to yours to look at his account on the screen. He smells like peppermint, and fresh laundry on a cold night.

“These are lost fees.” You grab a pen and point out his (very long) list of checked out items, tracing the pen’s cap slowly down to show the LOST status.

He shakes his head, and some of his golden red fringe falls into his face. “But I haven’t lost anything.” He brushes his hair out of his eyes with the palm of his hand, blue eyes wide and searching, and somewhat innocent.

“Well, bring everything back and then I’ll take the charges off of your account, and you’ll be able to check materials out after 72 hours.”

“72 hours?!”

You laugh while scrolling through his account again. “ _How_ have you been able to do anything on campus with this massive hold on your account?”

He grins widely at you and it makes your stomach hurt, in a good way. He pulls away and crosses his arms, one hand stroking gently or thoughtfully at the stubble on his cheek. “Well, you see. I have always relied upon the kindness of strangers.”

“I can put these on hold for you.” You offer, feeling bad that he took the time to look for things he obviously needs for class or his own research.

“I thought my account was lost.”

“Locked.”

He just hums, watching you click around on the computer.

“I’ll put them under my name,” you say, using the keyboard’s number pad to tap in your ID number rather than getting out your own university issued ID card to swipe and pull up your account.

He gasps harshly and it scares you so bad that you jump and look at him pointing at you, “I _knew_ you lot were always lying when you said I couldn’t check anything out without my ID card.”

“Based on your account’s current status, you should never be allowed to check anything out even with your card!”

“Then I’ll just have you start checking things out for me under your name. _Illegally_ ,” he waves his hand at your keyboard, “without a card at all.”

“I can kick you out of here, you know.”

“I’d like to see you try, little one.”

This shuts you up, and it seems to do the same for him because you both look at each other, slightly embarrassed and there’s a beat before he continues in his normal tone,

“You can have one guess a day,” he clears his throat, “for my name. But you must promise that you won’t ask anyone for help.”

“Does Google count?”

His head jerks back in confusion, like he wasn’t expecting a question. “Yes. No…No? Well, if you look for me on there, it does.”

“Since you have so many rules—”

“Two…ish.”

“Let’s draw up a contract.” You pull out the long receipt that you closed up in one of his books and flip it over to the blank back and scrawl out what you say, “No asking for help. No Googling Professor Kenobi. One guess a day.” You draw out two lines and print your name under one and ‘Prof. O. Ben Kenobi’ under the other. You sign your line and hold the pen out to him and watch him sign his name, almost wincing over his atrocious penmanship.

He’s hunched forward slightly while signing, his hair falling in front of his face again. “I’ll tell you what it is one day,” he promises, looking up at you. When finished, he straightens up, and caps the pen, holding it out to you with a dramatic flourish. “Until we meet again.”

He gathers up his stack and starts to head off, with you calling after him, “So, before your next visit, you’re going to…”

“Bring back the NOT lost items!” He calls over his shoulder.

“If they aren’t lost then why aren’t they here?”

He huffs, “I dunno where they are—” Your death glare interrupts him, but he recovers quickly, “AT THE MOMENT!”

\--


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reader decides to text our dear professor. There are increased library flirtations/teasing. Obi-Wan needs to give Reader a ride home from the library.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note: I apologize if the texting parts are hard to read. Bolded messages with a left-hand indentation indicate reader’s texts; bolded and italicized messages with a right-hand indentation indicate Obi-Wan’s. If someone has a suggestion that would make reading the text conversations more accessible, please reach out to me. Apologies if the numbers at the top of sections are confusing—it’s something I picked up from reading Stephen King for so long that it helps me conceptualize sections better. Each newly posted chapter will reset to ‘1’ for the first section. 
> 
> GRATITUDE: Thank you to everyone who has read, gave kudos, bookmarked, and commented on this. I was worried nobody would care.

\--

1

Something about Professor Kenobi’s good humor and total scatterbrain kept you in high spirits after you clocked out of your Sunday shift, sticking with you through your walk to the bike rack and your ride home. The rain held off during your ride and you were instead soothed by the spring wind that cooled your flushed face. The lack of rain was a fortune you didn’t anticipate and because of that you were still in a good mood when you unlocked your shared house and pushed your bike to your room. Your roommates, after the Saturday night party the night before, were nowhere to be found—they were probably out getting a late brunch somewhere. Not that you minded in the slightest. Sometimes it was good to have the place to yourself.

You shrug out of your backpack after closing your bedroom’s door and sit on your bed, unzipping your bag and dig for your phone. You poke around and scroll on it until you remember you never saved Professor Kenobi’s contact information. With a sort of bravery you don’t feel too terribly often, you save his number and _actually_ text him:

**Just so you know, I’ll report you to the library dean if you lose those books.**

You stare at your screen, still not quite believing what you just did. When the small ‘Delivered’ note shifts to ‘Read 16:38’, you immediately lock your phone and stand up, tossing your phone at your pillows. Your hands are trembling and you begin berating yourself for sending him a message. You shake your hands to try to get the jitters out and pace the length of your floor from your bed to the wall that is all but pasted with your favorite bands and others.

“Why did you do that?” You ask yourself and the slightly garish collage of faces.

You cover your face with your hands and groan slightly. Then your phone pings and you glare at it with wide eyes over your fingertips.

“It could be Rachel,” you tell yourself, and your postered wall. Bob Dylan looks at you doubtfully.

You move to sit at the edge of your bed and pick your phone up and unlock it to read:

**_Hello._ **

**_Then I shall report YOU to the dean for cheesing the system._ **

**_FUck_ **

**_cheating*_ **

You let out a shaky laugh. So, he’s just to be as expected. He’s just the way he was earlier this afternoon. His response space is still bubbling with the little ellipses when your bravery returns and you quickly text and send:

**I’ll ~*K I L L Y O U*™~ if you lose those books.**

And his next message goes through at the same time:

**_youuuu never sent me the taxi bill_ **

More texting bubbles from him, so you wait:

**_And ill not bother with contacting the dean_ **

**_you wretched murderess_ **

**_Ill call the ~*P O L I C E*®~_ **

**_Then your mother_ **

**_then your poor auntie_ **

**_who just cant ~*B E L I E V E*®~_ **

**_her sweet little librarian_ **

**_is a total monster_ **

**_an absolute nightmare._ **

**_…_ **

**_Then ill tell your karaoke clan_ **

You laugh so hard that you almost send him a slew of emojis, but only choose to respond with:

**Lyft.**

**_!!!_ **

**_Blast_ **

**_you know what i meant_ **

  
**You know you can send a longer message instead of a million right?**

**_Why on earth would i do that when i can ping you to insanity_ **

****

**I’ll put you on silent**

**_Im afraid you cant silence the truth my dear_ **

You lock your screen again and stuff your phone under your pillow in the hopes that if it is out of sight, then you can quell the temptation to respond. You needed to get some writing done, anyway. Hours of nothing (no vibrations, no sounds) and on and off you want to write him something, anything.

And by 11pm, when you’ve saved your latest thesis draft and go to set your alarms for the morning, he sends:

*~*~**~*~** Goodnight ~**~*~**~*~*

2

—

Throughout the following week, Professor Kenobi cuts through the library rather than walking around it like usual to get to his building. Some days, he’ll whistle to get your attention and wave obnoxiously before running his waving hand through his hair that seems to grow not only longer but burn a redder gold each day. He stops by on Friday when people are heading out for the weekend—in droves and trampling over one another—you’re the only one at the circulation desk. You always close up on Fridays, always leaving a little late due to the mess everyone leaves behind.

Professor Kenobi waits politely off to the side of the line of students standing impatiently, arms full of materials to return. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, sometimes frowning as he hitches the books under his arm up to a less uncomfortable angle, his other hand busy holding onto a to-go coffee cup from the campus Starbucks. He’s dressed similarly to the first time you met him: white t-shirt, skinny jeans (cuffed past his ankle), and simple loafers. His navy cardigan is unbuttoned, and the sleeves are loose around his arm. You can tell he’s itching to have a free hand because his hair has fallen closer to his eyes again, and he tries to brush it away with his hand curled around the steaming coffee.

“I got this for you,” he finally says when the line dissipates, books under one arm, and all but thrusts the paper coffee cup into your face while you take a stack of books a student is shoving into the side of your computer.

“Are you saying I look tired?” You stretch over your computer and scoop the books into your arms, and spill them in an untidy heap onto your now-empty seat. You take the cup from him, and he hugs his book to his chest. “And thank you for giving me caffeine so late in the day.” 

“You looked _grouchy_ ,” he scrunches up his nose at the last word, and you almost count the crowsfeet around his eyes. “And its not caffeine, its hot chocolate. I thought it would help you with this nastiness that apparently won’t leave us alone.” His shining eyes flick towards the windows at the dark downpour outside. Thunder rumbles and sounds close—you dread the bike ride home.

“I really appreciate it.” You decided to wait to drink from it; it’s still too hot. He watches you scan items back in and replace them in their home shelves. “Professor Kenobi?” You ask with your back turned to him.

He clears his throat (and clutches his books tighter to his chest). “Yes?”

“What happens if I break the rules in our contract?” You whip around dramatically, and he laughs. Almost a bit too hard in the utter silence and empty library.

“Youve already googled me!”

“No, I haven’t!” 

“I don’t believe you, but since I’m a man of honor, I’ll pretend that I do.” He sits his books (they don’t belong to the library—there aren’t any call numbers laminated to their spines) and pushes his hair back with both hands, leaving them there for a beat. “What happens if you break the rules…I dunno, my dear. I honestly didn’t think you’d last this long and that we’d need to get this far to consider it.” He chews at his bottom lip and smiles softly before scooping his books up again. “What do you think should happen?”

“I don’t know.” You lean over your computer, shutting everything down. “I’ve never done anything like this before.” You look up at him while you mouse over to the power button.

He doesn’t say anything for a long time while you busy yourself with last minute picking up, so you assume he just didn’t hear you. When you shut the lights off at the circulation desk for the evening, and come out from around the desk, sliding your backpack over your arm, he steps closer and looks down at you almost hesitantly, “What would you _like_ to happen?” There’s the soft, quiet voice and open, innocent eyes again. The air tightens and the familiar coiling of your insides (like a lasso capturing unnamable feelings and squeezing them all together) returns: just like the last time the teasing seemed to go too far. And you both look away from one another. Because you don’t know how to handle it; you don’t quite know the steps to this particular dance.

You clear your throat and go on like nothing happened as you walk together towards one of the exits, and reach into your back pocket with your free hand. “Well its fantastic that you brought me something because _I_ was thinking of you _this morning_ when I had to kick someone out of the library.” 

“You were thinking of me, eh?” And there’s the regular banter—the kind that makes you both breathe easily again.

You grin up at him—this is the moment you’ve been waiting for all day, cackling to yourself every time you thought of it. “I made this for you.” You give him a folded up piece of printer paper and watch him unfold it to reveal his photograph and a sign that says: PERSONA NON GRATA! THIS MAN IS A BOOK THEIF! DO NOT SERVE! ALERT FRONT DESK STAFF IMMEDIATEY IF YOU SEE HIM ON PREMISES!!

“You can keep that one—I printed an entire ream and pasted them all over the stacks.” 

He stops walking because he’s laughing so hard, like throwing his whole body into it, head tilted back and everything. You stop walking, too, to admire his state. “Its lovely,” he declares, tucking it into his messenger bag. “But it doesn’t look a thing like me.” Once his laughing is fully tapered off, he looks at you seriously, and you begin walking together again—shoulders, a bit closer than before. “Everyone will be quite confused,” he looks down at you and furrows his brow in concern. “I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time, my dear.” 

You are indignant, “That it _literally_ your [faculty photo](https://pin.it/QdrwlfI) taken from your department’s website.” 

He stops walking again, with a big gasp and points at you, “So you _did_ google me!” He tugs the printing out once more and squints at it. “I really wish I could understand your fascination with my old photographs.”

“I did not google you! I searched you on the school’s website. That is not in the contract at all.”

“So this is what you spend your working hours on.”

“Lunch break.”

“So your waking hours.” He holds the door open for you. “Well, you’re in luck,” he says casually, “because I just so happen to think about you during my waking hours, as well.”

“Where are you going?” He’s digging in his bag again.  
  
“To get my bike.”  
  
“Not today,” he opens an umbrella and steps closer to you. He pulls your bag off your shoulder and hitches it to his own so you can properly atand under the umbrella. “I’m parked just in the garage right here,” he nods with his chin. “Your bike will be fine over the weekend.”  
  
Your stomach drops and you wonder what its like to have legs that actually worked at one point. Somehow you make it to the garage and stare dumbly as he closes up his umbrella and unlocks an old, hunter green Honda Civic with a faded ‘coexist’ bumper sticker, and another (newer) one with a music note that says ‘trebel maker’ on it. He tosses the umbrella in the back seat and unceremoniously dumps the books after. He slams the door (which is a good indicatir of how he treats the rusted-in-some-places car overall) and shrugs out of your backpack and holds it out to you by the strap, staring at you intensely in the dim yellow lights. The brave part of your brain urges you to graze his fingers, but you don’t.  
  
“Would you like to get inside?” He asks when he opens the driver side door.  
  
You do, lifting the handle with fingers you can’t feel.  
  
You shut your respective doors at the same time and just stare ahead at the cement wall in front of the windshield.  
  
He turns his head and says quietly, matter-of-factly, “The car doesn’t start until everyone has their seatbelt on.”  
  
You roll your eyes at his SO teacher voice.  
  
“You’re precious cargo,” he shakes his head and fumbles with his belt just like you. “I take my passengers’ safety very seriously.”  
  
Once a dual click is heard from both belts, the engine turns over and the sounds of public radio fill the air, masked by the squelching sounds of windshield wipers needing to be replaced. The further you get from campus, the more distant of a memory your bike becomes. Fading too is your life prior to riding in a car with Ben Kenobi , who makes sure you’re warm enough on this damp spring night by angling the heating vents towards you, and never taking his eyes off the slick road or you when you hum along with the radio.

He doesn’t know that after he drops you off, you watch him from behind your window blinds as he pulls away into the evening. You don’t know until much later in the evening that his good night text was sent before he ever got home:

**_I hope you have a lovely weekend my dear._ **

**_See you monday_ **

**_~*~*~_ **


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reader is having anxiety about her assault last Friday night. She texts our dear Professor Kenobi, who accidentally FaceTime calls her while in bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be sure to click on the hyperlinks to look at the items mentioned.

\--

The sounds of a pregame party fill your shared house by the time you give up on reading the annotated hard copy of your thesis with feedback and other menial comments writ by your committee chair. You go up for defense in just one week, and while everything is mostly in order, you can’t stop yourself from putting your working through a last round of a quality check.

Either that, or you’d just burn it and forget about school—the anxiety was murder.

You pad out to your shared living room and see your friends helping one another get ready for the usual Friday night out, ensuring that make up was on point and that hair was flawless. Someone was shotgunning a beer in the sink, and yelling over the loud music that the Lyft would be here in five to ten minutes, so last call for any house drinks. Last call to make sure everyone had their keys, wallet, phone, IDs, cigarettes, lighters, and cash. The necessities.

“You never told me who came home with you the other night.” Rachel walked over, her slender and elegant fingers wrapped around a classy glass of wine. She was of course referring to your off the cuff explanation (and lie) from last Friday as to why you never showed up for the group song, opting to tell her that you brought a boy home. Well, it was _partially_ a lie—Professor Kenobi _did_ come home with you. Sort of. But he was far from a _boy._

“You know that it’s not like me to kiss and tell,” your cheeks are flushed from the anxiety that you’d have to keep up the lie, but it did suit the story.

“You haven’t kissed anyone in a while.” Rachel waggles her eyebrows while sipping her merlot, leaving a mauve colored lipstick stain on the glass. She smiles softly at you. Of all your friend-roommates, Rachel was your favorite and seemed to genuinely care about you.

“I’ll tell you how Friday went at some point,” you promise, and this pleases her.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us? You could find someone else to kiss and not tell me about this week.” Her free hand goes to your arm and you smile back at her.

“I’m sure.”

“I can stay home?” She offers, eyebrows raised, but you can tell she really doesn’t want to and is only being kind because she’s wearing her amazing shoes and looks so beautiful.

“No, I’ll just be doing some more—”

“Writing,” she finishes for you and you smile, in an embarrassed way. “You defend next week, isn’t it done yet?”

“I’m obsessing—I can’t leave it alone.” You pause for a beat and admire her ensemble, “I hope you have a great time tonight.”

“Yeah, you too. Please text me if you change your mind, _okay_?” Her gentle squeeze on your arm punctuates her request—much more genuine than her offering to stay in with you.

“I will.” But you already know that you won’t, and she does too, but respects your silent decision.

You hang out in the living room with the four of them while they finish getting ready, you curled up on the couch with a bowl of cereal and watching them finish their pregame drinks and shout at Alexa to stop playing their throw-back mix (currently the Spice Girls). They blow kisses on the way out, and you watch the door lock. You’re left in the silence and the fairy lights decorated around the house. You finish your cereal and migrate to your bedroom, locking your door out of the short jilt of paranoia over being alone that always creeps up your spine when they leave—sometimes you get a little nervous.

You sit on top of your bed and stare at your locked door. You feel restless, like you don’t know what to do with yourself. Not that you didn’t have anything to do. You lean over the edge of your bed and grab your bag, smiling while thinking of how Ben carried it for you.

You dig out your laptop and open it up, waiting for it to reboot, and you check your email, then texts. The last conversation in your queue is Professor Kenobi’s goodnight note.

You smile, again, and plug your phone in, tucking it under your pillow so it won’t distract you once your laptop is ready and you begin working on your thesis revisions and additions.

It’s well past midnight when you find yourself unable to focus any more. Daunting silence from the rest of the house. Your friends are still out and probably would be for much longer. You hadn’t gotten in until two in the morning last week, and they were much later.

And just like that you flinch as though you got a sudden chill and feel as though someone is pulling your hair from behind. Your stomach drops in an unpleasant way and you pull your phone out from under your pillow and send without a second thought:

**Ben.**

**_hello there_ **

****

**I’m sorry to bother you, but…**

His response is immediate, like he’d been waiting for you to reach him:

**_not a bother  
never a bother  
you never bother me i promise you  
*~*but???*~*_ **

**I’m thinking about last Friday night and feel so bad.**

You see his bubbles start, and then stop when he must see yours as you continue typing:

**  
I feel stupid. I shouldn’t be worried about this anymore.  
Right?**

Bubbles. Nothing. Bubbles. Nothing. Then:

****_hold on  
ill call yu  
you*_

You remember him telling you about going to the karaoke bar sometimes to keep an eye out on the students, and can just envision him sitting his winning pool cue down upon the green felt, and stepping outside after texting you that.

But what comes through is a facetime call instead and you furrow your brow, unsure whether you should answer or if he’d hit the facetime icon instead of the phone icon by mistake—he wasn’t the greatest at texting, you reason, so he could be as clumsy with other parts about cell phones. Not wanting to waste his time and kindness, you answer.

He’s not at the bar, and he’s not outside of the bar or any bar for that matter. He’s laying in bed, with messy hair and sleep filled eyes, all fluff and wearing a t-shirt with too short sleeves.

He runs a hand over his face before waving at you, and smiles, one eye closed. “Hello there. I didn’t mean to facetime you,” you smile at this, “pushed the wrong button. I can hang up and call you properly.” He lets out a little tired sigh and stretches, his free arm going behind his head to rest on it.

But you’re already tearing up and this wakes him up a bit more, something like alarm (or at least alertness) flashing in his eyes.

“Hold on,” his voice is closer to how you know it best during waking hours. You hear some swears when his phone goes flying off his bed and you can see his white ceiling once it lands on its back on the floor, he comes into view, briefly, hanging off his bed, gravity pulling his many layers of hair while he reaches for the phone. You see a host of plants in what you’re assuming is his bedroom when he yanks the phone up in a blur, and you’re struck with wild and invasive questions. Is he wearing any pants? Did he fall asleep in his jeans? Is he wearing basketball shorts? Doesn’t seem the type—he’s full of too much older millennial hipster dignity. Sweatpants? The ones that fit well? Banded at the ankle? But he’d of course have them tugged up a bit further than that, past his ankles, to match the way he wears his jeans. Is he not wearing pants at all? Is he in his boxers? Boxer briefs?

“Can you hear me?” He asks, breaking you out of your reverie—how much time had you spent on this entirely inappropriate taxonomy of his underclothes? When your eyes snap back to the face time call, you see that his face is too close to the screen that you only see the bridge of his nose and up to his hair all fluffed out and sticking in every direction up. His blue eyes are much brighter in the dark and they’re squinted, like he’s not sure about this phone thing at all.

“Yes, sorry. I guess I just got lost.”

He situates himself, sliding to his side, and all you see on the screen is a bunch of commotion of him pulling another pillow over to prop his phone on as he situates himself to be propped up on his elbow, resting his head against his fist. Like the way he would look at you sideways if you were in bed with him. “Are you all right?” he asks in his calm voice, totally stead, as though the past several moments have not been filled with his strange chaos of not being able to handle technology.

“It’s about Friday.”

“I remember.”

“I feel so stupid to be upset about it again.” You wipe at the corners of your eyes and lay down in the same way that he is, only in a way that you would be actually facing him if you were there beside him. “I mean I know it’s not. He assaulted me. But I just need to hear it from someone else.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“I needed to hear from you,” you look directly into your front camera so he feels like you’re looking right into his eyes. “I needed to hear from you that I’m not being stupid.”

“No,” he says, and his eyes do the same trick as you, and you feel an explosion of warmth in your stomach from his piercing gaze, “absolutely not.”

You both don’t say anything, taking the time to look at each other both through your front cameras and at your screens.

“I was thinking about you tonight, as well,” he confesses. “I’ve been quite restless all night, after dropping you home. I think I’ve been worried about you.”

“About Friday?”

“Yes. I know we joke around a lot, but I’ve been worried that you’ve been fibbing to me that you’re fine.”

“Honestly, I’ve been fine anytime I’ve been with you or talked to you.”

“Then I shall have to call you more often.” He pushes himself up taller on the arm he’s resting on and you can see the ghost of markings—a tattoo, or maybe a smattering of many—on his bicep where his shirt has ridden up. “It’s very late. You should get some sleep if you’re working tomorrow morning.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“Then I shall read to you,” he grunts reaching across his bed and his shirt rides up again, this time past his navel and an entirely new warmth pools in your lower abdomen and spreads until you clench your jaw to make it stop. “It is what my father did for me when I rebelled against bedtime as a youth.”

But you know that sleep won’t come to you for a long time—not with the image of his lightly, lightly tanned exposed skin and the sprinkling of hair that matched the color on his chest. And not with the flash of his navy waistband where you could make out the words ‘BANANA REPUBLIC’ repeated across until the letters disappeared, and what looked like a pattern of animals [printed](https://bananarepublic.gap.com/browse/product.do?pid=480128002&cid=1056612&pcid=9437&vid=1&grid=pds_29_272_1#pdp-page-content) all over the front of his upper thigh.

“Please don’t stare at my monkey astronauts,” his voice again breaks you out of your reverie, and when you’re met with his face again, he’s wearing glasses which will only fuel your insomnia. “I’m afraid I’m terribly sensitive about my eclectic taste in underwear, and I sincerely apologize that you had to see them.” But he doesn’t look sorry—not at all in the slightest—and the amused dimples in his cheeks are deeply set. “I’m also shy about my glasses, which I need to read. So I expect no judgement, thank you.” You had a judgement, all right, but one you can’t utter: they make him unbelievably more handsome. Handsome—when had that happened? Immediately upon meeting him? Immediately upon seeing him after that first meeting when you established your teasing rapport? When he stood so shyly in front of you, his embodied fragility wrapped tight in his favorite and worn cardigan, but so sure with his witty words and sharp, lingering gaze?

He’s settled back against his bed’s headboard, pushing his wild fringe out of his face, fingertips brushing it to the side that he normally has it parted. You wonder what your peers would think if they could see Professor Kenobi—normally so well-groomed and put together—so soft, and sleep-tousled in this moment, his stubble seemingly impossibly thicker since this afternoon’s banter.

“How are you holding your phone so far out? Are you using a selfie stick?”

“I refuse to dignify that question with a response. Such a ludicrous thing.” He comes closer into view as he picks his phone up. “No, I have a lap pillow for my iPad and books for reading in bed or sitting around.” The tip of his tongue runs a swift line across his upper lip and he squints his eyes, searching for a button on his phone. The camera flips as he shows you said pillow and tells you, “His name is Grumbis.”

You can’t believe what you’re seeing: a squared and brown stuffed [monster](https://www.amazon.com/Gifts-Book-Lovers-MSSOFT-Owl/dp/B07NVW97YC/ref=sr_1_13?crid=22Z9NUJJG3688&dchild=1&keywords=tablet%2Blap%2Bpillow&qid=1590335827&sprefix=tablet%2Blap%2Bp%2Cgarden%2C190&sr=8-13&th=1) holding a book: Moby Dick. A really nice edition of it, too.

“He’s got a zippy mouth that you can hide things in,” Ben says, pointing at it with his finger and demonstrating by opening it up to reveal a charger cable and what looked like soft Hi Chew candies, and empty wrappers.

“I’m glad you opted for a serious pillow, and not something so ludicrous.” You tell him while he flips the camera back to facing him and rests it against Grumbis.

“I’m very protective of Grumbis, and if you’re going to be cruel to him, then I shall not read to you.”

“No, Grumbis is fine.”

“He’s more than fine, he’s quite lovely,” he mumbles, brow furrowed again as he flicks through the pages, skipping past the several prefaces. “Oh.” He wets his fingertip with his tongue (and you feel absolutely feral) and he flicks back to several pages. He picks the book up in both hands, the cover to his chest, and looks down at the pages angling it so that you can see. “We are reading Moby Dick, and these are the illustrations of the ship and harpoons and things. Can you see them?” He tilts his head and looks at you expectantly, hair tickling at his glasses frames. “This is our Queequeg’s harpoon,” his long finger traces the length of the illustration almost adoringly, “an elegant weapon, for an important man.”

“I see.”

He smiles at you before resting the book upon Grumbis again, flicking to the beginning. “Are you ready?” He looks into the camera, into your eyes, from across town.

“Yes,” but you’re not sure if you’ve said that out loud at all.

He clears his throat, clears his nerves and crossed his arms over his chest and you can make out more of his bicep tattoos (well, what his short sleeve allows), and you notice all different colors, and at the very bottom, a small pencil outline of the girl Matilda from the eponymous children’s book—you would ask about that later, if it wasn’t such a personal question. You doubt anyone at school has seen his tattoo(s)—he’s always so well covered.

“Call me Ishmael,” his calm voice tells you, “Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.” He pauses and looks directly at you again. “Isn’t that lovely?”

“Yes,” but you would agree with him about anything right now.

“I’m not going too fast? Too slow?”

“You are perfect.”

He gives a shy smile when you stumble while trying to clarify that his _reading speed_ is perfect, and he clears his throat again before continuing on.

You don’t know how long he reads, but you do know you must have fallen asleep at some point (the both of you) with your phones still on because it is his bedside table alarm that wakes you up in the morning, just in time to get ready for work.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reader and our dear professor text throughout the week. She is up for her thesis defense. Poor Reader and Professor Kenobi get stuck together during a terrible storm advisory.
> 
> Warnings: Intimacy?
> 
> Thanks again to everyone who has read and is continuing to read. Thank you for the kudos and comments.

\--

Chapter 4

1

You don’t tell Rachel about the FaceTime call when she drives you to work, red-eyed and waiting on your coffees from your favorite drive through shop. But you want to. You will tell her, at some point. You wanted to know what it meant, that he would do something like that. But then you tell yourself, it was only an accident. Just like sharing his umbrella. And just like the Lyft ride home when your fingers were all put wrestling one another, working to wrench your hands into nothingness, and he (cross-legged because the driver’s seat was pushed all the way back and he didn’t have any room, right knee poking into the side of your leg) curled his own around your left ones, squeezing gently, and pressing them into his knee to calm you the entire ride home.

She hands you your iced cold brew and you drink it quickly, tricking yourself into thinking that the faster you ingest it, the quicker it will wake you up and bring about your daily clarity and alertness.

“Your alarm was really loud this morning,” she grumbles, flicking on the windshield wipers once again after she pulls away from the drive through window.

“I’m sorry,” you smile at her, but there’s something looser and sillier in the smile that she sees.

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“No its not,” she says plainly, grinning now. “Its about that guy, isn’t it?”

“No,” you lie, hard and she cackles, turning the radio down.

“Yes it is. You don’t have to tell me anything. Did he come over last night?”

“No!” This time she believes you.

She drinks from her overly sweet frappe that makes your teeth hurt, but you smile inwardly—her signature drink. “You should invite him over one day. I’d like to meet the boy who makes you smile like this.”

You say nothing and sip at your coffee thoughtfully, more slowly. Would she still be so excited to know the boy is actually an older man? One who she’s had an elective course with in the past?

“You don’t have to,” she tells you honestly, placing her drink back in the cupholder. “Only when you’re ready. Just don’t like…get married and not tell me.”

You laugh at this, perhaps harder than you need to because the idea is simply ludicrous. Professor Kenobi was simply your friend—someone who comforts you, like his father did to him when he was a child. He was a mentor, if anything. Just a friend. A friend who talks to you about his underwear, and reads you to sleep, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and asks if you’re all right.

A friend who texts you in the morning at the same time that you text him:

**I hope you have a good day.**

**_hello there.  
have a good day in the spooky empty library.  
~*alone  
  
_ **

**Stop it.**

**_i will not.  
grumbis hopes you have a good day too._ **

And he attaches a photo of Grumbis in his messy bed, vomiting a pile of Hi Chew wrappers all over his bedding (which includes a colorful Snoopy and Woodstock throw blanket), and papers and pens everywhere (he must be grading in bed), you dying a little bit on the inside when you see his socked foot in the photo—a pattern of cartoonish ducks printed on the lavender fabric. Yes, just normal feelings about a friend.

**You need to take better care of your pets. It looks like Grumbis had too much candy.**

**_grumbis is an angel hes allowed all the sweets he wants.  
now get to work._ **

****

**Excuse you. *~*YOU*~* get to work.  
It looks like you have more than enough to do.**

**_  
text me when you get home  
or ill worry myself to death that youve been kidnapped._ **

**I’ll be fine. I have my bike.**

**_  
let me know if you need a rife  
ride*  
the rain is supposed to keep._ **

**That’s really sweet, but I’ll be fine.  
I won’t melt :]**

**_:[  
at least let me know you’ve made it home_ **

You send several eye roll emojis with:

**Yes, sir.**

You watch him bubble and stop, bubble and stop.

You frown when nothing appears.

By the end of the shift, you’re bored out of your mind because it’s Saturday and it’s even slower than Sundays and you’re the only one working the desk—the other wings of the library are closed entirely. You check your phone and are a little upset that he still hasn’t texted you something, so you send:

**Oliver.**

Immediately:

**_cute  
but no._ **

****

So, there’s nothing else to do: no patrons, no items needing to be placed in their respective homes, no administrative work, and no emails.

You decide to visit his faculty page again. The first time was embarrassment and a slight shame tied to something that felt like stalking. You’d typed his name in the school’s homepage search bar, and it led you to the Music School indicating that he was housed in the piano department and some other work in classical guitar. You look at his photograph and smile at how young he looks, and how strange with a clean-shaven face.

Like most faculty pages, there is a list of recent or notable courses taught for the past three academic years; a short biography that lists out the academic institutions he earned his degrees at (undergraduate degrees in psychology and biology; masters in teaching and music); and any scholarly accolades earned: he had a lot. Not to mention a doctoral degree in pedagogy, and a master’s degree in music therapy. A lot of volunteering experience at hospices and assisted living homes where he played for those suffering from dementia and other illnesses.

In the navigation side bar, there’s link to his CV that you were too nervous to look at the first time you found this page. You click on that this time and scroll through, humming at his achievements, and read his publications closely: most of it was related to how music affects mental and emotional health, as well as different teaching methodologies at varying levels of education. Some, he was the primary author; but others, the oldest ones from when he was a graduate student himself, were co-authored and for his very first co-authored publication, you read the third name listed: _Kenobi, Obi-Wan B._

Your murmur his name out loud, relishing the feel of the vowel, how the first part is like an upward movement, and the second part a soft landing: almost melodic. Your face burns bright pink when you say it a second time, trying to swallow the silliness you feel when it seems like you’re rehearsing how you’ll say it to him for the first time.

2

On Monday, the first texts of the day come at the same time:

**Okay. Mondays suck. At least this one.**

**_are you having a terrible day too_ **

**YES!!**

**_!!!!!_ **

****

**What’s wrong with yours?**

**_paperwork._ **

****

You roll your eyes. Why was it that most faculty were so brilliant at whatever they did, but simple administrative work was the bane of their existence?

**I’m sure it’s not that bad. You’re so smart. You’re probably overthinking it, Ben.**

**_!!!!!!  
it is the worst  
you have no idea  
you don’t know what its like   
to do paper work  
for this blasted university  
you have no idea   
how hard it is to be meEeEe.  
i habe no idea what its asking me to do  
have*  
id send you a photograph   
but im sure that’s against *~*protocol*~*_ **

He sends you an eyerolling emoji.

You send one back.

****

**_What’s wrong with your day?_ **

****

**People are being really rude to me about their accounts.  
It’s the end of the semester, so everyone’s trying to get squared away before they leave for the summer break. **

**_atudnets?  
fuck.me.  
STUDENTS*  
??_ **

****

**No, it’s your kind.**

**  
  
_!!!!  
from my department?_ **

****

**No, faculty from elsewhere.**

**_hold on_ **

****

You subtly steal glances at your phone screen for the next several minutes as the next faculty member in line digs through what appears to be her life’s possessions in her tote bag for her wallet, for her university ID card. Over five minutes have gone by and the next person in line is getting _irate_.

“Can’t you just look me up by my name or employee ID number?” She asks, plucking out used tissues and a fistful of loose chap sticks (most missing their caps).

“No, that’s against their protocol,” another voice says and you look up to find Professor Kenobi standing in line a few people behind this one in front of you. “You need to have your ID because they swipe it on the thingy,” he points at the computer monitor with a coffee in his hand.

The woman whips around and gives him a death stare. Once she’s taken care of, and the next two people, Professor Kenobi presses the coffee cup into your hand.

“Please don’t be grumpy. There’s enough of that going around today.”

“This better have caffeine in it.”

“It does.”

\--

3

You’re both on campus until the same times on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He walks you to your bike on Tuesday.

\--

4

He visits you at work again on Wednesday and pretends to scold you for wearing a ballcap with the school’s name printed across it while at the desk, _tsk_ ing over the unprofessionalism of it all. When you protest, telling him that you’re allowed to wear whatever you want because you’re _actually staff_ and _it’s the end of the semester so staff can dress however they like,_ he looks around and when he sees no one is watching, he leans over the counter, grabs the hat’s bill, and puts it on his head, backwards, his fringe poking out the front.

“I’m about to call campus police to come escort you out of the building. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you or how clearer I can be that you are a persona non grata.”

“Ah, of course. Lucky for _you, I_ have this,” he reaches into the front pocket of his jeans and thrusts a folded up piece of paper at you. “It’s a doctor’s note, excusing my existence.”

You roll your eyes and unfold it while he innocently plucks lint off his navy cardigan.

_‘Professor Kenobi is permitted to access all corners of the library (and all places for that matter) in any manner he perceives necessary. -Dr. O. Ben Kenobi’_

“Please leave before you give me a heart attack and I die without getting to defend my thesis.”

“The dead don’t have academic commitments to take care of,” he shrugs. “Listen to your doctor.”

\--

5

By Thursday, there’s a non-verbal agreement established that he gives you a ride home after work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, him pushing your collapsible bike to the parking garage and stuffing it in his car for you while you wait in the passenger seat, looking for music to play for the ride home.

\--

6

On Friday morning he comes to visit you at work again, his hand shoved inside a bag of Goldfish crackers and munching obnoxiously while waiting in line behind someone yelling at you about how they _totally_ returned the iPad they borrowed well before spring break. Professor Kenobi leans to the side slightly to look at you over the man’s shoulder so he can roll his eyes in sympathy at you. He excuses himself to the man you’re waiting on before leaning past him, plucking a pen out of the cup near your desk and scribbles something down on a nearby Post-It note. He slips the note back into the cup with the pen. He heads out once again—he must have been cutting through the building. Something that regular people do. Nothing that a friend wouldn’t do. 

Once you resolved the _mysterious_ iPad issue, you all but send the cup of pens flying across the desk while trying to fish out the Post-It filled with cramped writing.

‘can’t wait to hear about your pass.   
(!!!!!)  
you will do beautifully my dear.   
*~*5:00*~*.’

It is, of course, in reference to your thesis defense scheduled for 3:00, meant to end at 5:00, which is when he asked that you promise to tell him the outcome.

\--

7

By 5:00, you’ve successfully defended your thesis and you text Ben a photo of the evaluation sheet to prove it.

So, you’re home (after Rachel picked you up when her shift ended and took you out for a glass of wine to celebrate before she goes out with your friends for the usual Friday night thing) and you hear someone at the door. And of course its him, with some kind of gift clumsily hidden behind his back. He’s gotten you a fake cop badge made, and it is inscribed with ‘LIBRARY POLICE’ on it.

He tells you you’re going out to celebrate and you thinks you’re going out for a drink but he says he’s taking you out for ice cream at this old mom and pop place a little outside of town but when he parks and you both get out of the car to go inside, you’re met with the manager at the front door who tells you, somewhat gruffly,

“We’re closing up.”

“Oh, I thought you were open later on Friday evenings?” Ben checks his wrist watch, as though to confirm their store hours.

“No, a storm’s about to hit. Didn’t you get the weather advisory?”

You and Ben look at each other and then sheepishly at the manager. You both kept emergency alerts turned off.

“You best get going,” the manager warns. “It’s going to hit hard, and fast. They’re saying wild wind and maybe hail. Could knock the electricity out and everything.”

You get back in the car and he confesses that he needs to stop and get gas.

“Your toxic trait is riding on fumes.”

“And your toxic trait is being mean to the good Samaritan who gives you free rides.” He turns the car off and leans over to press the button that opens the gas panel, “I’ve got to go in and pay, I only have cash. Do you want something?”  
  


“No.”  
  
“You’re sure?” He looks you over while unfastening his seatbelt.  
  
“Yes,” you watch rain begin to splash into an oil puddle not under the gas pump’s awning you’re currently parked under.  
  
“Okay.” He leaves, and jogs to the store.  
  
In the time it takes for him to pay, the rain is coming down so hard, it’s almost comical. It’s in sheets, and you have to squint to even see the trees in the distance that line the two-lane country road you know he’ll turn onto to get back to town.

He locks the gas pump in place and lets it fill automatically, getting into the car next to you.

He’s gotten you something anyway, a bottle of the iced green tea he sees you with sometimes at work. He presses it into your hand, and it’s wet with cold from the refrigerator and from the rain.  
  
He’s absolutely drenched, and shrugs out of his soaked navy cardigan that looks black in the dim overhead lighting. He tosses it in the backseat, and rubs at his face with damp hands.

“Here,” you say, placing your tea in the cup holder, and begin unbuttoning your flannel shirt, handing it over him to dry off with.

He dabs at his face and uses it to dry off his arms. When he’s working on his neck, you feel that strange surge of bravery again, and look at his exposed tattoos on his right bicep. You push his white t-shirt sleeve up to where it rests at the top of his shoulder. Your bravery moves you to touch his tattoos with the tips of your fingers. He watches you, dropping your shirt in his lap before twisting to the side a bit.   
  
“You like that?”

“Yes.” They’re all small, all different things. All things from books. A Kurt Vonnegut one: a grave stone etched with ‘Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt’; a Ray Bradbury one, the numbers 451 colored in with flames; the Matilda one with ‘All grown-ups get scared; just like children.’; an outline of Moby Dick with ‘I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing’.

Your fingertips trace each one, as though reading them in Braille. You feel his fine hairs there, and count the freckles that the light blesses you enough to see. Like that first night, he gently takes your fingers into his, but this time he kisses the pads, looking at you intently. He threads your fingers together, your palms touching. You lean forward and kiss his beauty mark on his cheekbone under his right eye. He brushes his nose to your forehead and you feel him exhale through his nose softly, warm on your skin.

His fingers run loose, and he withdraws from you, saying into your hair, “I should return the gas pump.”

When he returns and buckles in, he blinks at you, waiting until you click your seatbelt too. His shirt sleeve is still curled over his shoulder.

“Driving home in the storm is insane, should we stay here?” You ask.   
  
“Not to worry, my dear,” he murmurs, flicking the bright headlights on, “I’ll get us there.”

You both agree it would be best to wait the storm out at his house, since it is much closer and you don’t want to chance a dangerous drive across town to get to yours.

8

It was much more difficult to see without the streetlights on; Professor Kenobi’s headlights barely cut through the heavy darkness and driving rain. When you park, he tells you it’s a bit farther away because it’s on street parking, and you’re about a block away from his house.

“I think.” He says.

You look at him sternly. “You think.”

“Yes, we’ll it’s quite dark, isn’t it?” He smiles at you, pushing his still-wet hair back with both hands. “We can wait to see if it lets up.” He pulls out his phone and checks the weather app. “This says its not even supposed to be raining right now so it’ll probably be over soon.”

He’s turned the engine off, but has kept the car or battery on so the heat is still circulating, and the music is still playing. “I’m sorry that your big day went sort of sideways.”

“It’s not your fault—you don’t control the weather, and for what its worth, I had a really nice time with you. If you hadn’t come over, I probably would have just binge watched a TV show I’ve seen a million times until I fell asleep.”

You wait almost ten minutes and if anything, it pours down even harder and the streetlights flicker, but don’t come back on. The rumbling thunder in the distance scares you.

“Maybe we should make a run for it,” you say.

“We can certainly try.” He bites at his lower lip and squints out into the dark, searching for familiar landmarks in the neighborhood to judge his house’s relative location correctly. “What do you think?”

“We should go for it. I don’t want to wait and see if lightening strikes us here.”

He chuckles softly and turns the car off, takes his seatbelt off, and reaches into the backseat for his cardigan. “Let’s go for it. Do you need a countdown?”

“No!”

They open the doors quickly, and he runs past the front of the car to join you, and grabs your hand in his slippery one, leading you to his house.

Someone’s flying down the street, a reckless Mustang without their bright lights on, and where the storm drains are clogged with leaves and mud, you both get more drenched with wet and muck when the Mustang drives through the running stream backing up next to the sidewalk, splashing it all over you. You swear there’s mud in your bra, somehow.  
  


You can literally pour water out of your shoes by the time he’s unlocked his house and you yank them off in the space in front of his front door.

You’re peeling your socks off when he already has his off and is trying to flip several light switches on and off, but nothing comes on, and his appliances aren’t even displaying the time.

“A transformer must have blown,” you say, standing close to him in the dark, his hard wood floor cold on your damp, bare feet.

He hums in agreement, “You stay here,” he says while turning his cellphone flashlight on. “I’ll go grab some towels and dry clothes. Then I’ll get the fireplace going.”

While he makes his way to the hallway, you use your own phone’s flashlight to investigate his living room. It’s pretty normal until your phone illuminates the fireplace and you gasp harshly, loudly. “Oh my god.”

“What is it?” He asks quickly, bolting back to you and pointing his flashlight to meet yours over the fireplace, aimed at the two swords mounted over it. “Is it a bug? Is it a roach?”

“What? No. The things on the wall! The swords. Do you use them for larping?” 

“What is that?” He points his light at you and you swat his hand away.

“It’s like this live action role playing thing where people go out into the woods and act out sword fights and stuff.”

He sighs, a long-suffering sound. “I daresay I’ve never been quite so cultured until I met you. _No_ , they are not for _larping_. They are fencing sabres. The one on top was my father’s, and mine is below.”

“Oh my god, you were a fencer?”

“Most of my life, yes.” He puts his free hand on his hip and tells you almost sternly if not for the ghosting smile, “If you’re going to be mean to my possessions, you can wait in the car until the storm passes.”

And, right on cue, as if to punctuate his offer, a strong crackle of lightening booms out, sounding closer than ever.

“It’s okay, Professor Kenobi, I won’t tell anyone you larp.”

  
His long-suffering sound is back, and he grumbles about going to get the towels.

He comes out with two towels, and no shirt. His towel is draped over his shoulders like a cloak, his wet white t-shirt is in his other hand. “I just wringed this out in the sink,” he says nonchalantly as he drapes it over the back of a chair to air dry.

He moves to dry your face off looking down at you. “I can throw your clothes in the wash.” He surrenders the towel to you and you look at his chest, the tufts of red hair now dry, random freckles chaotically decorating his skin as though the maker had them in a sprinkle jar and shook harder over some surfaces than others when decorating him. His birthmark, like a thumbprint where his collarbone meets his shoulder and you grip onto the fluffy towel to stop yourself from touching it or kissing it.

He leaves the living room so you can undress and gather your wet items to throw in the washing machine. You wrap his towel around you, covering everything but your limbs and shoulders on up. He returns when you call out, asking where the washing machine is so you can throw your stuff in. His towel is wrapped around his waist, one had clamped around the knot. His other hand has clean clothes for you. His clothes.

“I’ve got these for you to change into. You can shower if you’d like. I’ll wait out here, of course.”

You feel gritty and gross. “I don’t want to put clean clothes on a dirty body. Can you show me how to use the shower?” You ask, knowing they work differently everywhere.

“Of course,” he says, leading you to his bathroom, which is not only surprisingly roomy, but decorated with plants and filled with different skin and hair products from Lush.

  
He turns the water on, and waits until steam fills up the room.

  
“Obi-Wan.”

  
He stills, and is almost reluctant to turn around, but he does. “Yes?” He’s white-knuckling the knot on his towel now and he doesn’t ask how you know his name, how you figured it out. Because it doesn’t matter anymore.

  
“Will you join me?”

  
“Yes.” It comes out in a breath, in a single exhale.

  
But he turns his back to you as you let your towel pool to the floor and step inside the shower. There are several moments that pass, and you’re almost certain he won’t join you. But he does, sliding the door shut with a trembling hand despite the steam and the heat and keeps his back to you. His cellphone is face down on the sink and the flashlight is on and cuts through the glass shower door to where you can see each others faces. Your mind is clear, filled with genuine affection that rips your heart and frightens you; the lust is gone, and you only admire his shoulders and the haphazard collection of freckles there, too. You close your eyes when you sense he’s turning to face you and don’t open them until he’s talking.  
  
“My toxic trait,” his voice is a little unsteady and he swallows hard, “actually is going to Lush every Sunday and picking out something new.” He picks up some soap. “This one is called rose jam; it’s my favorite.”

His eyes never leave your face. He puts the soap back down.

“What are you thinking about?”  
  
He doesn’t say anything at first. The stream of water is hot on your back. “I’m thinking that I would like to kiss you. Kiss you properly.” He breaths out a shaky and nervous breath, “Very much so.” And there’s a stutter in his hand as he reaches out to touch your cheek. “But I’m scared.” You swallow hard when he touches your face and your breath hitches. “Are you scared too?”

  
“I’m not afraid of you, Obi-Wan.”  
  
You snake your arms around his neck loving the feeling of the hairs at the nape of his neck being damp while most of his layers are not, and his hair has fallen into his eyes again. His arms wrap around your waist and he steps you both under the hot stream of water the tip of his nose pressed into the divet where yours meets your cheek. You feel him slightly, slightly rocking your bodies together not to elicit an obscene friction, but as though in a dance and his nose explores its place against you gently at first then with a shy pressure as he moved to nuzzle into you affectionately.

One of his hands leaves your back, and you almost mourn the absence until he traces his fingertips up your wet cheek, eyes shining and dark at the same time. You run your fingertips down his neck, hand resting over the wet hairs on his chest. His other hand covers yours and he pulls you into him, pressing his lips to yours for the first time, his beard wet but still able to scratch softly at your skin. You can’t tell where the shower’s steam ends and his warm breath begins, but you breathe him in as though oxygen would never be good enough again. His peppermint scent is back, but there’s also the smell of outside clinging to him, an earthy smell. His hand moves to cup your cheek firmly, pulling you closer still, his nose pressed into you harder, and your lips move against his deftly, catching his lower lip and touching your tongue to it lightly, he moves against you, opening up for you and your hand is in his hair, tugging at his damper locks, his hand returning to the small of your back, you arching into his embrace.

He pulls away, but still pressed into you, foreheads touching, his fingertips dragging against your lower lip. “Stay the night?”

You kiss his fingertips. “Of course.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reader and our dear professor have soft moments, drama, and salacious touches. 
> 
> Warning/Rating: R? NC-17? I don’t know. They do stuff in this chapter. 
> 
> As always, thanks for reading and leaving kudos and/or comments.

\--

1

“Don’t close your eyes.”

“Sorry, I’m just…embarrassed about being excited.”

“Don’t be sorry. I’m excited, too. You never have to be embarrassed about anything around me.”

Obi-Wan lets you wash his beard in the shower and you pout at him when he tells you he has plans to trim it down. 

“You’ll look like a little boy,” you protest and he smiles down and you, raking a dollop of soap off his cheek and smearing it on your chin. 

“I will not, I promise.” 

He tells you about the many, many different products from Lush that line his shower caddy and walls while you both wash up and you pretend to be interested, not hearing anything at all because you’re too stuck in your head by this bizarre romance and comfort. But when the bathing is done, the embarrassed silence returns and he leaves you to dry off in the bathroom while he takes another room. 

You meet in the hall, you wearing his old soccer spirit t shirt of your school from a game now more than five years in the past. His borrowed boxer briefs (with bananas all over them) fit like shorts on you. He leads you into the living room where the fireplace has been working since you’ve been drying off and dressing, warming the room, bringing in a nice light. He unceremoniously drops his arm full of pillows in front of the fire as you remark about how he has a LOT of them in his house. 

“I’m afraid my pillow collection is tragically lacking when it comes to my collection of fleece throw blankets.” He directd your attention to an antique wooden chest that rests near one of his bookshelves. When he flicks the copper latches open, you see that its contents are only blankets: the kind one gets from craft stores and ties knots/tassels into. “My other toxic trait is making too many of these.” He yanks several out and tosses then where the pillows are,and grabs his copy of Moby Dick from the coffee table. You both settle into the pallet he’s made and he starts reading to you by the firelight. You nod off at some point, just like you did when he first started reading this to you over the phone, and he wakes you by pressing his finger on the tip of your nose and gently wiggles it from side to side.

“You fell asleep,” his frown is petulant, almost child like. “You told me you _like_ this book.”

“I don’t know what you expected when this is the book you read me to sleep with.”

“Then I’m afraid we must start the chapter over again,” he shakes his head in admonishment, his teaching voice is back and his brows are knit together in a silent frustration as he flicks back several pages. 

“I’m not asleep,” and your own petulance is here as you sit up and face him cross-legged as well, your knees almost touching.

This wretched desperation, stomach roiling in a chaotic frenzy of butterflies.  
  
At one point it thunders so hard that you jump and grab his knee. He grabs your hand without looking for it and mutters a soft, “I’ve got you,” before going back to the text. 

“Come here,” he says as he shifts to sit with his back into the nearby armchair. He draws his knees up and he guides you to sit in front of him, you relaxing your back into his chest. He draws one if the larger throws around you both and the steady hum from his chest as he differentiates characters’ voices moves you to settle into him more completely. 

  
The thunder and rain and crackling fire and sound of the gutters releasing their burden of rainwater all melt together and you’re not sure where one ended and the other began. And you sleep. 

2

By the time you wake, you find he’s left your now dry and clean clothes from the night before folded neatly beside you and you change into them in the bathroom, not without blushing when you recall that the night before did indeed happen and was not a dream. You enter the kitchen (where you hear him banging around), shrugging into your now freshly-laundered flannel shirt over your t-shirt, and find that Obi-Wan is pulling a bag of thawed frozen peas from the fridge. You join him at the counter, see that he made coffee, and you measure out two cups.

“Breakfast?” You ask, referring to the bag he’s cutting open with a pair of garden shears. “And you don’t have regular scissors?”

He glares at you about the scissor remark, then chuckles, “No, these are for my ducks. The peas.” He points at the bag with the dangerous tool in his hand. “Not the shears.” He cuts the bag’s tip and then carefully tucks the shears into a nearby drawer.

“You have pet ducks?” You sip at your cup of coffee and watch him work around the kitchen. He pulls the blinds over the kitchen open, and the sun rise is a welcome return from the night’s darkness—the pinks and blues in the sky acting like nothing happened the night before. The full, green trees acting like they hadn’t dropped entire limbs all over the neighborhood.

“Well, kind of.” He pushes his hair to the side, futilely. The morning glow catches in his layers, and eyes, and you drink your coffee, hoping the slight burn in your mouth will calm you. “There’s this pond out behind the house,” he closes one eye, and points out the window where you have to stand on your tip toes to see. It’s more like a large puddle than a true pond. “And they like to visit in the mornings, so I give them breakfast.”

He dumps the peas in a colander and rinses them out in the sink before getting a massive plastic mixing bowl out from a cabinet, dumping the peas in and adding water. “Would you like to go with me?” 

He wraps his arms around the bowl and clutches it to his chest, fingers interlaced in front.

“Yes. Absolutely. Please, take me to your ducks.”

“Wonderful. Could you please bring that for me?” He nods towards the cup of coffee you readied for him. 

“Yes, no problem.” You carry both mugs carefully by their handles, and follow him out the kitchen door after he backs into it to open it. “Do they think you’re they’re mom?” You ask, your unbuttoned flannel shirt billowing around you when the wind picks up.

The wind tousles his hair, and he looks down at you thoughtfully. “I don’t _think_ so? I think they think I’m their auntie that likes to feed them or something.”

Once you arrive, the ducks are _very_ loud, and all but steamroll their way to him. One runs into his ankle and he teases it gently about needing to be more patient. “One of the girls had babies,” he tells you. “I hope she brings them today so you can see them.”

He bends slightly to sit the bowl down, and the ducks totally frenzy around it. One tips it over and they are machine-gun fast at literally gobbling them up.

“They’re so funny,” he murmurs, thanking you for his coffee and looks down at you while sipping, watching you watch the ducks. 

“I would like it if you could stay with me, at least until lunch. But if you need to go, I understand.”

“I would like to stay a while. I’m glad you want me to.”

“Stay as long as you like.”

3

Monday, you text him the details about the coming Monday’s plans: its Memorial Day and how traditionally, you, Rachel, and your third friend and roommate (Alicia) usually rent an Air B and B at the lake.

**It’s something we do every year. It’s a lot of fun. We play drinking games and float in the water. I wondered if you wanted to come, too.**

**_i cant swim_ **

****

You send an eyeroll emoji:

**I’m sure you can.**

**_!!!!!!!_ **

**_hold on_ **

Within seconds, your phone is ringing (a regular call) and you answer. “What?”

“Hello to you, too.” He says this gruffly, but you can hear his smile, and you’re immediately up and pacing around your room.

“Hello.”

“Can I see you before you leave for your day trip?”

“No.” You frown. He must not have understood what you texted. “Actually, I wanted to invite you.”

“Oh…” And he sounds really taken aback. “I thought you were joking.”

“No. Rachel asked me if there’s anyone I wanted to bring along. We all usually bring our boyf—a guest.”

“Oh.” He doesn’t say anything for a while, and you feel like you may have offended him or something so you follow up with:

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.” This comes out quickly, all one word it seems.

“No! I just…there isn’t someone else you want to go with you?”

“I wanted to ask you.”

Another long silence before he says, “I see.”

“Think about it?”

“I will.”

“You promise?”

“I promise. Go to sleep.”

4

You ride to the lake with Rachel and the guy she’s been seeing. His name is Will and when he first started hanging around with your friend group, you were a little surprised upon meeting him because he’s not typically the type of guy she’s gone out with in the past. He’s far more rugged than previous beaus and flings: very muscular, with beautiful dark curled hair and kind blue eyes. Not only does Will insist on driving, but he also insists on playing Pearl Jam the entire way there, singing what he really believes are the lyrics but absolutely are not. Rachel asks you for the thousandth time that afternoon if your “boy” will be joining you. Obi-Wan had been quiet throughout the week, texting more infrequently—he’d shared some anxiety about meeting you there.

“Yes.” The excitement and dread still come in waves. If anything, Rachel and Will wouldn’t judge you for seeing someone who used to be an instructor of theirs. But you and Obi-Wan were just friends, and this would be a good way to introduce your new friend to your old ones.

Another sampling of your own anxiety is related to the guy that Alicia’s bringing. Tyler. You and Tyler have a little bit of a history because you went on a few dates and hooked up a few times during your undergraduate years at school due to running in the same friend group.

Tyler was someone you used to have fun with and he was your first adult relationship. Just like Obi-Wan, you’d flip-flopped your decision to join the rest of them throughout the week, expressing your anxiety to Rachel. You told her more than a handful of times that you weren’t sure if you wanted to go on the day trip or not because of Tyler. Rachel assured you that it’s been so long since you and him were together that it would be fine. You convince yourself that you most likely never meant enough to him for it to be awkward when you’d see him again because it was such a casual thing.

Things aren’t awkward with Tyler when you meet with everyone at the small dock behind the house you’re all renting and staying in—he’s far more interested in gross PDA with Alicia, attempting to share the same pool float with her, as well as the same can of White Claw. Rachel tugs at your leg after you tell everyone that you don’t want to get in the water yet, and Will splashes her as a humorous punishment: his huge arm all but creates a tidal wave. You and Rachel share a pool noodle and thank Will when he wades over with a beer for each of you.

Obi-Wan shows up a little later—not long after Rachel asks you for the _ten_ thousandth time if he's coming—and you don’t notice how divine he looks until walks up to the dock wearing a tank top with a print of the Golden Girls on it, powder pink lace up Vans sneakers with a panda bear pattern on them, and swim trunks (with an incredibly short inseam) that cling and stop well above his knees knee. He’s also wearing his usual navy cardigan and your hat that he stole from you a couple of weeks ago. He shrugs out of his cardigan and lay it on the dock, the six-pack of beer he brought on top of it.

He sits at the edge of the dock like you were and smiles from behind a pair of dark-tinted Ray Ban aviator sunglasses.

“Hey!” Rachel yells, interrupting an incredibly boring story Tyler was sharing about the time he had to drink a ton of mixed liquor out of an old boot during his fraternity initiation.

“Everyone, this is my friend, Ben,” you introduce him, stomach twisting and turning in nerves.

“From school,” Tyler drawls from beside Alicia on their shared float that was running out of air. “I didn’t know we were going to have a chaperone today. Don’t worry—we’re all old enough to drink.”

“Tyler,” Alicia says, obviously embarrassed.

But Obi-Wan is not perturbed. “I’m a teacher; not a cop.” He pushes his sunglasses up past his forehead as though this proves something and Tyler simply continues his story but directed only at Alicia.

“You should come in before this one drags you in,” Will warns, relaying your less than graceful entry into the water courtesy of your best friend.

Obi-Wan’s eyes just shine at you and he heaves out a sigh before stripping his tank top off and slides into the water. He dunks underneath it and when he emerges, he straightens his sunglasses before pushing his hair back with both hands. He snatches your hat that’s trying to float away on the ripples he’s created and wades over to you, putting it on your head backwards.

Rachel kicks at your leg underwater and you share a silent scream with your eyes, looking at each other. You dunk under the water, too, to hide your blush.

5

After dinner, and when the sun is almost finished setting, Alicia and Tyler go to the backyard and light up the fire pit. You and Rachel walk down together and silently scream at each other over Will’s arms and tank top because he is carrying the heavy cooler, walking in front of you.

Rachel grabs your arm, hugging it, and says, “I REALLY like your boyfriend.”

You tell her, “He’s just a friend.”

Obi-Wan’s sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped around them and you take your hat off and place it on his head again and sit close. Rachel takes one of the camping chairs next to you and gives you a look that says ‘not your boyfriend my ass’ when Obi-Wan wraps you in his cardigan.

Tyler comes back from grossly peeing in a bush (even though the house is close enough to need a bathroom) and snatches the cardigan off. He turns it this way and that in his hands, remarking over how old it looks, and feints throwing it in the fire. Obi-Wan stands up so fast and says, “Please give it back. It was my father’s and it’s one of the few things I have left of him.”

Rachel is out of her chair in a flash and snatches the cardigan before shoving Tyler in the chest, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Tyler gives her the middle finger before curling up next to Alicia and cracking another drink open.

Rachel hands the cardigan over before taking her seat again, “Sorry, Ben.” Will gives Tyler a look of warning before he sits in front of Rachel, leaning his back against her legs.

You start playing a drinking game—something like Truth or Dare, but only about telling the truth and it starts with silly and fun questions like ‘if you could bring back one type of dinosaur what would it be?’ but Tyler starts pushing the limit and gets grosser asking how far people have gone with their significant others, etc. One must take a drink if one doesn’t want to answer the questions. Most of you did a lot of drinking when Tyler asks his questions.

In an effort to lighten the mood, you ask Will if he wore his tank top today to show off to Rachel. He takes a drink and then yells, “Yes!” It turns out that Will is a bit of a light-weight because he’s the most tipsy the quickest.

At some point, after grabbing another drink from the cooler, he attempts to climb into Rachel’s lap and proceeds to break the chair she’s sitting in. She shouts at him, more hysterical from laughter that turns into hiccups rather than true anger, “THIS IS NOT OUR CHAIR THIS IS GOING TO COST LIKE FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS!”

And it feels like the rest of the night is going to be okay, until it’s clear that Tyler just can’t let go of his perverted questions when he gets brave (or drunk) enough to interrogate you directly, “So did you start fucking Dr. Kenobi before or after you graduated?”

Nobody says anything.

You and Obi-Wan work really hard to not look at each other, and where his hand had been inching towards yours very slowly for the past half hour is drawn away and into his lap where his fingers nervously fidget with one another. Rachel has lost it, she tells Tyler to get the fuck out. Alicia says they all put in money to stay the night here, and he has just as much of a right as anyone to stay. Rachel says that the place is on her fucking credit card. Will says he’ll give Alicia and Tyler both their money back plus interest if they leave. Tyler says it was just a joke and if everyone was going to be such a little bitch about it, he wouldn’t have made it. Will says he and Rachel won’t kick his ass into next Memorial Day if he and Alicia go back and call a Lyft now.

Rachel puts the fire out not long after Tyler and Alicia make their way back up to the house. Then she and Will walk back together, holding hands.

“I may leave,” Obi-Wan says, lacing up his shoes and shrugging back into his cardigan when you hand it back to him.

“Don’t pay any attention to what that asshole said. He’ll be gone soon enough.”

“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.”

“You don’t embarrass me.”

“I just don’t want him talking shit about you, making it difficult for you because we’re—”

“Friends.” You finish.

He looks down at his other shoe, fingers not moving the laces. “Yeah…friends.”

“Look, we can stay down here until he leaves. And if you still want to leave by then, I’ll respect that.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

6

You’re both laying on your backs, using the pool floats as makeshift pillows and watching the gray clouds swirl around the black sky, pinholed by stars. There’s nothing but the sound of crickets that won’t sleep, and the water lapping against the dock’s stands. His fingers curl over the top of yours and he squeezes them before turning his head to look at you. You’ve had your head turned the entire time, watching his chest rise and fall, admiring how his hair looks in the dark, how his light blue chambray shirt sleeves are rolled up his forearm, the soft rise and fall of his chest.  
  
“What are you thinking about?” You ask, moving to sit up crossing your legs.  
  
He watches you for a beat before following you.  
  
His eyes are bright and dance over your face. He goes to start and then stops. Like the way he texts: bubbles and stops, bubbles and stops. He grabs your hand again and turns it over, threading your fingers together and his warmth makes your stomach flutter and your chest ache. “I’m thinking that I’m glad you invited me. And I’m thinking that I’m glad that I agreed to join you.” He squeezes your hand briefly before letting go of your hand and lightly touches your bare knee with his fingertips. He pushes your hair back softly and looks at you for permission, imploring you, “I thought about you the entire drive up and was hoping we would have a moment to be alone. I have not stopped thinking about the first time we kissed and how afraid I was to touch you.”

  
You don’t know when you stopped breathing until you let out a long breath through slightly parted lips that his gaze turns to.

  
“I’ve dreamed about you touching me.”

  
His hand slides up to the hem of your shorts, pressing into the material.

  
“Do you trust me?” His hand keeps moving and you want him to go faster and slower. His fingertips lightly brush down the waistband of your swim shorts, his hand shaking when he goes to curl under the elasticity and slowly traces the backs of his fingers against your lower belly. An electric stirring shoots from your core and down your legs, and a whine escapes your throat as you jolt against him. He calms you, stills you, by nudging his hand up your shirt just a bit and resting his warm palm on your hip.  
  
“God yes.”  
  
He into you and kisses you hesitantly, his free hand cupping your face. You kiss back harder, with more pressure, catching his lower lip in yours and tentatively flit your tongue over it. His gasp is warm and soft, the surprise in it triggers something in you to press your tongue into his mouth, and he runs the tips of his over and under yours before gently nipping at your bottom lip with his teeth and your hand fists in the leg of his swim shorts.  
  
He wraps one arm around your shoulders and lay you down on the sleeping bags and moves to hold himself over you, straddling one of your legs. In the starlight, you can see the outline of his cock straining against his swim shorts and you’re filled with a sudden desperate longing that spills from the cracks you can feel spreading throughout your chest. He rests his weight on his left forearm and he shudders gently when you touch his hair there. He brushes your hair behind your ear with his fingers near, and you see his chambray shirt sleeve strain around his flexing bicep.

There’s nothing else to do with your hands except work on unbuttoning his shirt and letting it fall open. It frames his torso in a way that makes his skin and slight muscles and collarbone a secret only for you. An almost dreadful and hopeless longing shatters what remains of your heart when your fingers trace from the firm and softness of his lower belly. You lightly caress the scattered fine hairs and he shivers while your touch lingers at the trail of hair just below his navel. You’re not brave enough to touch his waistband like he did yours and instead you move your hand up to his chest relishing his beard scratching at your cheek and crying out when his tongue, sure and hot, licks at the shell of your ear and you marvel over his soft chest hair, slipping some between your fingers and tugging at it lightly.

He nips at your earlobe before pulling back and studies your face, soft with delight and wonder and kisses your forehead, “Do you want me to take this off?” He means his shirt. He asks this heavily, chest heaving with shallow breaths, eyes burning and burning into yours. His longing sears you and fuses together some of the loose feelings in your chest.  
  
“No, you look gorgeous like this.”  
  
“Stop,” he flushes, excited and embarrassed. It makes him even more alluring.  
  
To comfort him, you mock his accent and the usual text he responds with when you ask HIM to stop something, and he dips closer to kiss your mouth before you say, “I will not.”  
  
He chuckles against your lips before kissing you sweetly at the corner of your mouth, “Cheeky thing. What to do with you...”  
  
You take his face in your hands, tracing his cheekbones with your thumbs before leaning in to kiss his birthmark on his chest.  
He presses his hips into you, and you feel his hardness on your thigh and gasp onto his bare chest. His elicited sigh is warm when it covers the bridge of your nose, and his fingertips move to a tickling creep up the inside of your thigh, bare above your knee.  
  
An unimaginable flash of heat drops from your core and you feel as though you’ve wet yourself and have, in a way. For him. Always for him.  
  
You can hear him swallow and his breathing has turned shallow and is lost to the delicate wind that tousles his hair across his forehead. Some of his layers are sticking out at the sides, and his fingers disappear up the leg of your own swim shorts. His fingers stop at the apex of your groin where your inner thigh meets your outer labia and he lets out a beautiful soft sound: something between a desperate sob and keen moan. He presses himself into your leg harder still, burying his face into the crook of your neck and runs his tongue flat up to your jaw.  
  
His hair smells like sweat and outside and his honey shampoo, and from his bare shoulder a lingering scent of sunscreen. You press your nose into his shirt shifting it where there’s a gap from it hanging open, and you kiss where his shoulder meets his neck.  
  
“Obi-Wan,” you sigh in a voice you don’t recognize. It’s a tone you’ve never heard used when speaking to anyone else.  
  
He cries out against the crook of your neck when he hears his true name. His fingers slowly creep over to your aching slit, and he moves with you when you spread out just a bit more for him. He pushes his clothed cock into you again and his shaking fingers move to feel your mound pressing into the hair there, and his kiss whispers against your neck. Your lips move to his throat, the tip of your tongue catching the sweat that’s broken out on him. You feel him swallow, hard, against your lips when you kiss him and you run your fingers up his back, lingering at the small of it. This tickles him and he bucks against you, a premature frantic stutter this time instead of the cautious nudges, and his entire frame shakes over you, your name cried a little too loudly but not heard by the stilled lake, the sleeping wildlife, the darkness.  
  
“Obi-Wan, please.”  
  
He pulls back to look at you (or is he admiring you?) and you close your eyes, jaw moving slowly, slowly to open your mouth for a sound that catches and doesn’t release when his fingers brush into your slick folds. Upon contact, he groans loudly, his jaw opened like yours and manages,  
  
“Please don’t close your eyes, my darling,” he breathes into your mouth. His fingers are stilled in your warmth and when you’re brave enough to open your eyes and your gazes meet, you feel his first and middle fingers begin a slow, agonizing petting that brushes against the nerves around your inner lips and creates a tugging friction against your clit. “I want to see you.”  
  
A mewling sound dies in your throat and you run your fingers through his hair to steady your shaking hands. He begins rocking his hips against you in time to this tender petting and his middle finger slides easily to your entrance and you cry out his name, feeling a miniscule well of tears build up when he applies a gentle pressure, his thumb moving in slow agonizing circles around your clit.  
  
“You feel so lovely,” he says and then immediately flushes with embarrassment.  
  
“You,” is all you can manage. “It’s you.”  
  
His finger slowly enters you and you arch your back into him and his lips crash into yours to catch your cry once he’s all the way in, curling against the spot deep inside that you’ve only been able to reach yourself so few times. You kiss him with a clumsy desperation trying to convey the deep comforting pleasure he’s giving to you and he breaks the kiss to murmur, “I know,” against your lips, “I feel it, too.”  
  
You silence him by opening your mouth to him again, moving to have your tongues meet and his own wet, warmth makes you clench around his finger and his groan is low: almost guttural almost feral.  
  
His thumb speeds up and presses more firmly into you, his strokes against your leg more needy.  
  
“Can you take another?” He asks, nose pressed into the crook of yours, delicately kissing your cheekbone. “For me?”  
  
“Please,” it’s not quite begging, but it’s damn close.  
  
His withdraws slowly and his absence is sorely missed. You feel your own deep wetness against your thigh when his knuckle brushes against it and its almost lewd almost shameful at its intensity. And then, and then, there’s a stretched pleasure from a wider and firmer gift his hand gives you. This time, his thrusts against your leg match his fingers pumping in and out and curling into you, the thrumming almost unbearable, a burning pull and tug, and fluttering, and when he asks, “Will you touch yourself for me?”, your fingers all but fly to your clit, touching his other ones on you as your rhythm follows the same frenetic pattern from the other night when you couldn’t sleep and were thinking about him—absolutely sinning over him.  
  
He cries out your name again, his cock now frantic against your leg, and a pool of heat is trying to escape from you, and then you’re coming hard and painful on his hand, and you don’t care how loud you’re yelling his name or how hard he’s bitten down on your shoulder through the thin fabric of your shirt. You feel like you could go a second time when his hips stutter and a pool of warmth presses onto and wets your bare leg through his short. The gentle grunt that falls out of his throat after whining your name, after he’s lost control of himself, is something you work to burn into your memory.  
  
He withdraws his hand and collapses to his side. You somehow manage to turn to face him both of you catching your breath. He touches your leg, shyly now, where he’s come on you, and feels the damp soaked into the hem of your shorts. “I apologize for that.” You say nothing because you’re paralyzed by the site of him wiping his fingers drenched with you on his chest like a precious salve.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reader ruminates upon a spicy flashback with our dear professor; Reader and Obi-Wan talk about their friendship while he drives them home from the lake; more soft texting and FaceTiming; we meet a friend of our professor’s; and we learn more about Obi-Wan’s father and romantic past.
> 
> As always, thank you for reading, commenting, and giving kudos.

\--

1

The next morning, Rachel and Will wake you and Obi-Wan with their cackling from the kitchen. Will has attempted to make pancakes, and it’s futile. He’s burned the skillet, and the smoke alarm is going off.

“We should just let the house down so they never realize we’ve fucked up their pans,” Rachel is saying, and you can hear her starting a pot of coffee and getting more food from the refrigerator that shuts loudly.

It takes you a moment to realize where you are, and that you’re not home. And that you’re entangled on the couch with Obi-Wan, resting fully on his front, your legs entangled, the side of your face pressed somewhere between his bare chest and shoulder. Your shirt had ridden up in the night, and your bellies were pressed together in a warmth like no other. One of your hands has slipped under where his shirt covers the other side of his chest, and his hand rests upon yours over the fabric. His other arm is wrapped around the small of your back, under your shirt, holding all of your sleep warmth there. That hand stirs, and his fingers begin tracing short patterns on your skin while he wakes, and you bury closer into him not wanting to get up yet. His nose goes into your hair and you feel his scruff scratch at your forehead.

“We should help them,” he whispers, nose against your forehead followed by a kiss.

You groan and push yourself up, pressing your weight into his chest gently, and he sits you both up with you in his lap, straddling one of his legs. He looks at you for a long time, eyes trailing over your lips, your nose, your cheeks, before finding your eyes again, and brushes your hair out of your face and his warm hand palms the back of your neck before pulling you into him for a hug, your chests flush with one another. He holds you loosely, his hands exploring your clothed back, and then tightly like he wants to say something but only sighs.

“What is it?” Your fingers go into his hair and smile at how it feels oily with sweat from sleeping together in such a warm room.

His nose goes into the shell of your ear and he breathes against your neck, “I like being able to say good morning to you without a phone.”

You return the tight embrace, and then push yourself slowly away, pressing against his bare chest with your fingertips, trying hard to not spread them through his hairs. You smile in response, and stand, and he follows you into the kitchen (buttoning his shirt) for what you’re both sure will be the worst (but if not most endearing) attempt at breakfast in your life.

“You two slept late,” Rachel says plainly, but you see the glint in her eye that tells you she wants to hear all about last night after she and Will left you. She hands you a coffee mug, and then one to Obi-Wan. “We’ve gotta check out in like an hour.”

Obi-Wan asks, “What needs to be done?” He’s grooming himself again, pushing his hair this way and that. His shirt rides up with the motion when both hands are in his hair, and you die a little on the inside when you see a flash of his bare abdomen.

“We need to make sure we’ve got everything out of the rooms,” Will says, jerking away from the skillet that he’s now throwing bacon on with grease popping into his bare arms.

“We didn’t stay in a room,” you say from over your coffee and Rachel and Will look from you to Obi-Wan.

Obi-Wan clears his throat, “We didn’t store any of our possessions in one.”

“Well that makes it easier,” Will says, digging through some drawers to look for something longer to poke the bacon with without getting burned. Rachel turns the fan on to get some of the smoke gone.

“We should have just waited to eat until we got into town,” she says, covering her mouth to stifle her laughter as Will takes out a very long spatula meant for grilling, and slips oven mitts on each hand.

“Would you like a hockey mask, as well?” Obi-Wan asks dryly, trying to look concerned, and Rachel loses it.

And you relax. Because this is so easy. Like Will and Obi-Wan had been there all along for all the other trips since you and Rachel had been friends.

Rachel begins clearing out the refrigerator for everything you’ve brought, and you follow Obi-Wan around the kitchen and rooms with a garbage bag as he gathers things to throw away. When the bag is full, you take it outside, and when you return, you find that Obi-Wan has spruced up the couch you slept together on, and he’s standing with one arm wrapped around himself, his free hand stroking at his beard thoughtfully as he looks down at it.

After breakfast (which didn’t turn out so bad after all, but you’re all sure that you’ll have to pay for the ruined cookware), you tell Rachel and Will outside that you’re riding back into town with Obi-Wan. You help them pack up their car with the coolers and things, thanking Will for the ride down. And as you’re packing Obi-Wan’s car with him, playing a strange Tetris game to make sure all of the things that shouldn’t be a car—like a bookshelf, books belonging to him and the library, new clothes with the tags still on them, empty Hi-Chew bags and wrappers, and empty La Croix boxes—you tell him that his car is a fucking mess.

“No wonder you can never find anything.” You say, waving a library book at him before laying it in the back floor board. He’s tossing the junk in the front passenger seat into the back seats, and squints his eyes at you over the seat that separates you. “You’d make a horrible Hufflepuff,” you say when you’re both in the front seats.

“Well maybe I don’t want to be a Hufflepuff,” he quips, waiting for you to buckle your seatbelt before starting the engine. “What is that, a type of marshmallow?”

“Yes, they are marshmallows that are very good at finding things.” You glance into the back seat, and then at his profile—he looks deep in contemplation. “Can I take a picture of your carbage and put it on the internet?”

“My what?”

“Carbage. Your car garbage.”

“No.” He’s fiddling with the radio, making sure that it’s loud enough for you to hear, but low enough for you to understand one another. He angles the vents to you so you get some warm air blown on your bare legs in the chilly morning.

“Hufflepuff is one of the Hogwarts school houses in Harry Potter,” you tell him, plugging your phone in with the lone cable plugged into a converter contraption pressed into the cigarette lighter. You place your phone in the cupholder, noting that the bottle of tea he got you so many days ago (forgotten and unopened) is still in its place.

“I never read those books or saw the movie.” His arm is wrapped around your seat, and he’s looking over his shoulder as he backs out and you count the number of few silver hairs poking out of his stubble.

“Yeah right.”

“No, I haven’t.” He looks at you brightly, earnestly as he shifts from ‘reverse’ to ‘drive’.

“I should read them to you.”

His eyes light up at the thought. “I would love that. You could read them on the off nights for Moby Dick.”

“I bet you would be a Hufflepuff.”

He frowns at this, and accelerates as the speed limit signs indicate that he can go faster down this two-lane road canopied by full, green trees. The shade makes the car chillier, especially with the windows rolled down, but neither of you move to push them back up—you like the way the wind tousles his layers, and wonder if he feels the same about yours.

“Why would I be a Hufflepuff?”

“Because you’re so nice.”

“And the other houses are not nice?”

“They are.” You explain the different House traits and he bites back laughter over how serious you take it.

“Would you still be friends with me if I was in Slytherin?”

“Of course,” you say easily, shifting the vents away from you when you begin to feel too warm. “I read online where someone like psychoanalyzed the Houses, and they said that those two Houses make the best fit.”

He whips his head dramatically at you, “Then I should like to be a Slytherin. You can be nice for the both of us.”

He changes the station to the local branch of NPR and you both listen quietly to the news. The stories become fainter as you fall into a reverie of the days leading up to the trip.

2

Thursday night before trip brought you home with Rachel and you ordered Chinese food and are playing old records on an old Crosley player that was most likely stolen from a previous roommate. Neither of you remember where it came from.

“Robert Plant can get it,” she says, cutting out the freshly printed photographs of John Lennon she’s going to decorate her mortar board with.

“You mean, like, when this record was made.”

She stops cutting for a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe Robert Plant from any era.”

You give her a look.

She gives you one back. “Don’t act like you wouldn’t let Paul McCartney get it now-a-days.”

“Paul McCartney is _different_.”

“Paul McCartney looks like someone’s nana. And not a fun cougar one like Steven Tyler. Like, the nana who doesn’t let you sit on furniture.”

“You better leave Paul alone before I tell Will all about John Lennon.”

“What makes you think Will isn’t into my marriage with a dead man?”

You roll your eyes.

“And what makes you think that I won’t tell your boy about Paul?”

“I don’t have a boy. We’re just friends.”

“Friends who spend the night together, and who don’t have names apparently.”

“Ben.”

Rachel waggles her eyebrows and pastes an obnoxious photo of John Lennon onto one of the corners of her cap. “Oooh, _Beeen._ What’s he like?”

That’s when your phone pings:

**_hello there  
was just thnking of you  
THINKing**  
!!!!!!  
am winding down for the evening.  
I hope you have a good time with your friend tonight.  
goodnight my dear…_ **

Rachel raises her eyebrow at you, waiting for a response once you’ve finished reading.

“He’s sweet. Really sweet. Like Will.”

Rachel smiles at this. “I’m glad—you deserve sweet.”

“And he’s funny. But in a dry way.” You blurt out, seemingly unable to stop. “And so smart. And he reads.”

“Is he cute?”

You blush and tell her no, while reaching for more craft supplies for your own cap decorations.

“Have you two…”

“ _No._ ” _No, not yet? No, not ever?_ The thought of never getting to be more intimate with him makes your stomach drop in disappointment. But, friends don’t do things like that with one another.

“Have you kissed?”

You think to lie, but your face is burning, and she leans forward, swatting at your knee and asking you to continue, so you tell her about him coming to get you last Friday night. About touching each other in his car. About showering together, and spending the night.

“Are you sure you’re just friends?”

“Yes.”

Your other roommate and sometimes friend, Alicia, is walking into the living room and Rachel asks if she wants to join you two to decorate her graduation cap, too. But she tells Rachel that she is actually leaving, that she’s off to see Tyler.

Rachel rolls her eyes over the name after Alicia leaves, and then takes your hats, and sets them to dry under a slow turning fan. “Well I’m about to take a shower, if you want to join me. Since, you know, that’s what friends do with each other.”

\--

And at graduation the next morning, Rachel is standing beside you and can’t stop fidgeting with her hair that sticks out from under her cap, and huffs, “Is this even on right?”

“I think so?”

“We’ve done this before,” she’s talking about the undergraduate ceremony you shared. “How did we forget to wear these in the meantime?”

“I guess we’ve been more concerned with other things,” you murmur as she pulls out her phone and tries to use the dark screen like a mirror.

You flick through the program and try to memorize all the fanfare that precedes the actual conferring of the degrees. There’s a lot. Many speeches from the administration; singing; speeches from the valedictorian, from the salutatorian; special thanks to the Provost’s Student Affairs Events Committee; special thanks to Dr. Ben Kenobi for his piano accompaniments; special thanks to the university choir—

_Special thanks to Dr. Ben Kenobi for his piano accompaniment._

“What!” You shout, absolutely not meaning to. Rachel stops with her phone to glance at you, and others in the line give you a passing once-over at your sudden outburst before returning to their chatter.

“Nothing,” you say, a bit unsteady, feeling like you won’t be able to make it out of this room and down the hall to the massive gymnasium. You go to fold the program and keep it from Rachel, but she’s of course too quick in snatching and speed reads the page you were on.

Her brow furrows. “What’s the big deal? A long as fuck ceremony. So what? It’s not unexpected.” She looks at you and there must be some kind of look on your face because she puts a more careful attention upon the page, this time tracing the timeline of events with her finger and you steady yourself, bracing for her eyes and surprised exclamation,

“Is this _your_ Ben?” She whisper-screams this at you, and you’re grateful that—unlike your outburst—it goes largely unnoticed by your peers.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this is who you were talking about last night? I would have known who you were talking about!” She says this somewhat breathlessly from excitement at finally figuring out who your new friend is.

“You’re not mad? Disappointed?”

“I’m not mad. He is precious.”

“You’re not mad.” Somehow you couldn’t get over this, even though of all people you knew that she would mind the least.

“I’m honestly more surprised that it took you this long to find a paramour from the faculty pool.”

“Para—he’s not married.”

“You know what I meant.” You also knew she was just kidding.

“We’re just friends anyway.”

“Oh. Yeah. Right.”

But the conversation is cut short. “Get into line with your respective schools of the university, you must. In alphabetical order, you should be.”

The small and wizened man with green stoles and hood, indicating he represented the school of theology, said. He walks the floor, leaning on his cane, and his gaze seems to linger upon you and Rachel as though he knew you were out of order. You both find your proper places in the great reshuffle and migration of students.

“March out in time with Professor Kenobi’s playing you will. Fill in all the empty chairs. Do not worry about getting lost. With all of your friends, you are. Cell phones must be silenced—please respect all speakers.”

The piano is on the stage and you must walk past it before getting to shake hands with the president of the university and accepting the small, cardboard, cylindrical tube that you know your actual degree is not in. And, oh god, he looks so much better this close. He’s sitting politely at the end seat (the one closest to the piano) of the chairs organized in a neat line behind the president’s podium with the university seal stamped on the front. You are a few people behind the ones up next where Provost Organa is reading the names carefully, pronouncing each one with a perfect and correct meticulousness.

It’s difficult to focus on the names, the shifting line, but you manage to admire Professor Kenobi from afar and how very handsome he looks, especially with his trimmed and thinned-out beard. You’d been devastated at first, when he told you he would be shaving. When he told you the night he took you out last Friday. The night you touched his tattoos with a harsh twinge of affection that burned your chest and up your throat.

He shifts in his seat, crossing his leg gracefully (almost daintily) over the other, his clasped hands folded and resting on his knee. You think about the freckles dusting his wrists, the backs of his hands, the hairs on his forearms that beautifully match the ones on his chest. His white dress shirt is worn so casually under his black blazer, but he looks so elegant: unbuttoned, no tie, and clearly no undershirt because you can see those same hairs the closer you get to the steps leading up the stage.

Professor Kenobi is leaning forward, eyeing the line, and you almost wonder if he’s looking for you. You find that you’re right when his eyes meet yours and crinkle into a shining smile, and he takes one end of his soft orange stole embossed with the music school’s name and logo, and subtly waves at you with it. The orange in the stole brings out the fiery shine to his hair. You blush furiously and almost don’t hear your name; he watches you walk the stage and doesn’t avert his gaze until you’re in your chair. You, like most of your peers, set your phone to vibrate instead of off, and when you feel it go off once you’ve settled into your seat, you have one guess as to who it could be.

**_youuuuu  
did not tell me   
you were coming to the ceremony_ **

****

**You didn’t tell me you’d be performing!**

****

**_!!!!!!!!!!  
you shouldn’t be texting  
this is a very serious event.  
eyes up front._ **

****

**I’m never talking to you again.**

**_:,,,,[  
you owund me  
would  
wound!!!**  
*!*!*!*!*  
  
  
_ **

**Stop it.**

**_i will not._ **

****

But you do speak to him again. It’s after the ceremony, after the processional when you’ve been separated from Rachel, and you feel a tug at the sleeve of your gown and you turn to find him grinning down at you.

He leans forward, like he’s going to tell you a secret, and because it’s just too loud in this outer room. “I just wanted to congratulate you.” He pulls back and looks down at you and before you can say anything, let alone think of a smartass response, he swoops down and presses a soft kiss on your cheek, close to your temple, his finger in your cap’s tassel’s threads.

\--

You and Rachel sit out on the front steps waiting for Alicia to come out. It’s a nice night if not a bit chilly, and you haven’t gotten the Lyft yet because Alicia wasn’t ready yet like usual.

“Are you going to invite Ben to the lake?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t even know if I want to go.”

“You have to come—please don’t make me go alone with Alicia and Tyler.”

You won’t be alone, you’ll have Will.”

“You know what I mean.” And you do because you both never have as much fun in group settings without the other.

“I don’t want it to be weird,” you say. “Because of Tyler.”

“It won’t be. You’ll have your boy.” She’s poking around on her phone to order the Lyft, and yells, “A-LI-CIA! IF YOU’RE NOT OUT HERE IN FIVE MINUTES, WE’RE LEAVING WITHOUT YOU!”

You don’t tell her how seemingly nervous Ben has been since you invited him.

“And besides, you can’t not come—you already Venmo’d me your portion for the rental fee and I refuse to refund you.”

You don’t tell her about the sick feelings that quell your stomach are telling you that you’d be glad to pay your amount to not have to go at all. She seems to pick this sentiment up from you.

“No bad vibes, okay? It’ll be fun. Just like tonight will be fun.”

And the night had turned out fun once you settled into one of the local faux/Americanized Irish pubs that clears out the dining area to turn into a dance floor. How long had it been since you’d gone out dancing with your friends? Fall break? Before that?

“You look like you’re thinking too hard, and not having fun,” Rachel says, waving her hand in front of your face.

“I’m going to get a drink, you can’t dance to this song anyway,” you point out, referring to the Zombies’ ‘Time of the Season’ starting up over the speakers. The bass thrums in your chest and when you start towards the bar, your eyes lock with a familiar gaze.

Really? Here? Tonight? Your legs don’t work as well as they should as you gravitate towards him, and his predatory stare. Your breath hitches in your chest, and you mean to glare at him in a playful way, but instead the feral tug behind your navel makes you look at him more hopefully.

“Professor Kenobi,” you greet him evenly once you make it to the bar where he’s perched on a stool, someone beside him. “Are you celebrating your successful concert from this morning?”

His friend laughs at this while Obi-Wan scowls at you. “ _No_. Dr. Windu decided I needed to come out with him for a drink.”

Dr. Windu offers you his hand and you shake. He looks at you thoughtfully: a handsome man with round glasses, purple well-fitted slacks and a sharp waistcoat and button-down combination. “I thought tonight would be a good time for Dr. Kenobi and I to meet some lady friends, but it looks like there’s only students. Are you a student at the university?”

You swallow hard at his words about them being out looking for women. “I-I was. I graduated this morning.”

“Oh, congratulations! I should get you a drink to celebrate.”

“I’ll get it,” Obi-Wan says, almost too quickly. And he orders your drink of choice—something you told him during one of your many, many conversations throughout the week.

Dr. Windu furrows his brow at this, and looks from Obi-Wan to you. Obi-Wan notices once he’s handed you his drink and makes a sloppy excuse about knowing you from the library and seeing you at another bar at one point, chatting about drinks while you both waited for a bartender to take your orders. Dr. Windu smiles like he believes the story you back up, almost too fervently.

3

You’re jolted from your thoughts when he tells you that he needs to pull over for gas. It’s the same station he stopped at that first night he tried to take you out.

When he returns to the driver’s seat, he wordlessly passes you another bottle of tea. “Do you want to go home with me?” He looks at you, eyes almost hopeful, and worrying his lower lip between his teeth.

You exhale, feelings from the past few days too raw. You look at his hands in his lap, twisting nervously, and a heat pools in your stomach, spreading everywhere like a fever when you remember that not twenty-four hours ago he had made you come on them, and kissed you sweetly, and wiped your essence on his chest, and held you through your sleep like a lover. No, you can’t go home with him—you know you won’t be able to control yourself, and now doesn’t feel quite right to be alone with a man—someone becoming your closest friend—you’ve been so confused about.

“No.”

“Oh.” He looks so crestfallen, and he turns the engine on. “It’s okay,” he says quickly, working to recover from the rejection. “I can take you back. It’s all right.” But it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself.

The drive to your shared house is filled with a different kind of silence, and when he kills the engine, he doesn’t look at you like he usually does.

“What are you thinking about?”

He shakes his head like he doesn’t want to answer, but then speaks at his steering wheel, “I’m thinking that…I’m wondering. I. Do you… _like_ being my…my _friend_?”

“Of course I like being your friend, Obi-Wan. I wouldn’t have invited you to the lake.” _And I wouldn’t call you in the middle of the night. Or text you every morning. Or every night. Or throughout the day all day._

“Right. Of course.”

You unbuckle your belt and he hands you your bag once you’re out of his car.

“Text me when you get home?” You ask, shouldering your bag and shaking your key ring to find the one for the front door.”

“Yes, of course.”

But he doesn’t. And you don’t text him. Or call him.

4

By Tuesday night, you’re in agony because you haven’t heard from Obi-Wan and you hadn’t seen him in the library. But you don’t bother him; it’s late, not that it mattered before, but it seemed to matter now.

So you call him on Wednesday, and he answers with a shout:

“Fuck off!”

  
You jerk back from the phone, a bit nervous, and offer “Sorry. I can call back later?”

  
“No no, no. I’m not talking to you,” his long-suffering sigh. “I’m talking to _Clark_. Sorry, he’s trying to eat all the peas.” You can actually hear his frown.

  
You laugh, too hard in relief. “What is he? A mean duck?”  
  


“ _No_ , he’s this goose that comes to gate-crash my pond. Yes, I’m speaking to you, Clark. Go _home_.” Obi-Wan sighs that long suffering sound again. “He’s a right bastard,” but his voice is low, like Clark is still there and can hear everything he says. “Hold on.” He hangs up and FaceTimes you instead to show you Clark, who looks quite ruffled and is missing several feathers.  
“He’s a brawler,” Obi-Wan tells you, flipping the camera to face him, but all you can see is his cheek and right eye and beauty mark as he tromps back to his house. You can hear his steps squelching in the mud and hope that he’s barefoot or wearing shoes—apparently, he has a habit of tromping around outside in his socks. “Clark got into a real barnburner with one of the females the other day. I’m afraid she _‘clapped back’_ quite hard, as you would say.”

“I would never say that.” Your embarrassment over his improper use of slang is assuaged by the affection you feel for him trying.

  
“Well, she absolutely bodied him,” he says dismissively and you don’t tell him that that’s not quite right, either. “It’s unimportant. Have you ever heard the song ‘Street Fighting Man’ by the Rolling Stones?”

  
“Yes, of course.”

  
He camera shows you his nose and up, his blue eyes wide and bright with earnestness, “Well, Mick Jagger wrote that song about this blasted bird,” he says this seriously, his dry humor making your stomach coil in delight. He eyes the camera lens and for a moment you wonder if he can actually see you, so you try to quip back unperturbed:

  
“Actually, I’m looking at the song on Genius lyrics right now,” you’re not, “and it says that Keith Richards is the one who wrote it.”

  
“Well, then. That websites name is an oxymoron because they’re clearly wrong.”

You don’t talk about the absence of contact, and by Thursday night, everything feels normal again.  
  


5

  
Thursday night’s FaceTime book club night doesn’t bring ‘Moby Dick’, but instead you starting the Harry Potter series with him.

“I hope you appreciate how lucky you are to get to start this journey for the first time.”

He’s sitting in the middle of his bed, lap full of fabric, as he’s making one of the throw blankets he buys compulsively from the craft store. His glasses are slipping down his nose, and he wrinkles it in an attempt to push them up without having to use his hands. You imagine his phone is resting on Grumbis, and that there are candy wrappers everywhere.

“What are you working on?”

  
“Something for you,” he says with a slight shrug. He clumsily tries to show you when he grabs his phone, trying to flip the frame around. “Miss Jennifer at the Joanne’s fabric store told me this is from Harry Potter.” It’s the Marauder’s Map print. “I’d hoped it was a pirate’s map, but I don’t think it is.”

  
“Yes, it’s from the third book. And no, it’s not a pirate map.”

“There’s multiples?” He groans over your note about there being a third book.

  
“Yes, and if you hush, you’ll get to hear about how Harry is left on a doorstep by his future teachers. You should like this book, there’s professors in it.”

He says something under his breath and pushes the blanket away and rolls onto his stomach (like a brat), chin resting on his folded arms and paying rapt attention.  
  


“Obi, I really don’t believe you’ve never heard of Harry Potter.”

  
“I’m the oldest millennial alive, I just missed the age gap to become ensnared in its mania. And you are twisting my words. I know he is a little boy with a magic death stick; I just don’t know what all happens.”

You roll your eyes and start reading. You don’t get far until he’s interrupting you again.

“Are you going to do voices?”

“What?”

“For the professors.”

“No, I’m just reading.”

“If you don’t do voices, I won’t know who’s speaking, and I’ll never fully understand what happens to Harry.”

  
Embarrassed, you put on a wizened voice for Dumbledore, and a lighter, crisper voice for McGonagall. Obi-Wan is delighted.

When you finish the fourth chapter, Obi-Wan’s fingers are playing in his beard thoughtfully. “My father believed in magic. Not tricks, or like this book. But a feeling.”

You close the book and lay in a way that you’d be facing him if you were with him.

“What was your father like?”

“He was the greatest man who ever lived.” He says this seriously, but sounds like a little boy saying it, and it melts your heart. “He got cancer when I was working on my PhD. Before that…” He trails off, his fingers having moved to stroke his eyebrows. “The second time we met, you talked about my university ID card. I haven’t had it changed because that was the last time my father was able to drive me to school for my first day. He did that every year I started a new grade, even when I was in my PhD coursework. My ID is from the new faculty orientation day—the last time he was well enough to drive, and he took me to school. I just haven’t had the heart to change it.”

You don’t know what to say. “That’s a really great story.”

“I still have old videos of him. I can send one if you’d like.”

  
  
6

He sends the first video while you’re at work the next day, and you count down the seconds until your lunch break to watch it in the back office with your headphones in. The video comes attached to an email with the username handle being ‘kenobi212’.

“Is this damn thing on?” You hear an unfamiliar voice in the background and you lean in closer to your phone screen as though that would make the person appear. And he does appear, as he looks into the red recording dot, squinting. He’s a handsome, older man with a graying beard and long hair pulled back into a ponytail. “I don’t know, son. This probably isn’t recording.”

“Let me see,” Obi-Wan’s voice calls out, and his hands take the camera and he squints at it, too. “No, it’s on. You’ve got the dot lit up.” And he’s beautiful—his hair, an impossibly bright strawberry blonde. His face, smooth, with less lines. A smile in his eyes that makes your stomach hurt.

Obi-Wan’s father takes the camera back and you see Obi-Wan sit at what looks like their kitchen table. “Okay, son. This is take one of my dear son, Obi-Wan, practicing his dissertation defense. Obi, I’m not going to ask you questions they’ll ask. I’m not sure what they’ll even ask. But this exercise will help you feel less nervous to speak about your work. Remember, my darling boy: you know your work best. You’re the expert here, son.”

“Thanks, dad.”

“And you’ll need to watch it once we’re finished so you can make sure you don’t make your silly and faces when speaking with your committee. Okay?” His father begins his interrogation of his son, asking silly questions in a serious tone like, “Doctoral Candidate Kenobi, could you explain the curious atomic phenomenon related to Hot Pocket snacks, explaining why the temperatures are almost always unbearable, citing examples?”

Obi-Wan answers everything seriously.

When the practice is done, Qui-Gon asks softly, “What are you going to wear?”

“I wondered if I could borrow your cardigan, actually.” Obi-Wan is flushing.

“Oh, you’ll want something much nicer than that, my boy.”

“I hoped it could give me luck,” Obi-Wan admits.

“You don’t need luck, darling.” Obi-Wan’s father loudly sips from the coffee cup in front of him. “Now, to change topics. Are you seeing that girl tonight?”

“Oh, pop you know you’re the only woman for me,” Obi-Wan’s cheeky smile is as endearing as ever. If not more so here because you can see all of his face—the parts that are now always hidden by his full beard or stubble.

His father chides, “Surly and austere mothers don’t count, Obi. I just don’t want you to be lonely.”

Obi-Wan bows his head, “You know school is the most important thing in my life.” He looks back up, grinning. “You are far from austere.” His father laughs, while Obi-Wan continues. “I’m fine; I’m happy.”

“I worry you won’t know what happiness really feels like. When the most important thing in your life isn’t school or a thing at all, but another person. Who isn’t me.”

The video cuts abruptly. It ends too soon, you protest. But, your break is also over.

7

The next time Obi-Wan visits you at work, it’s been a week since the lake trip. He tells you that he’s teaching a summer course with undergraduates, and he calls them younglings. After a brief chat, and you congratulating him on returning one of the library books from his car, he leaves.

Your coworker had taken their Air Pods out and watched the entire interaction. It isn’t until after Obi-Wan leaves that they are looking at you.

You furrow your brow in confusion. “What?”

“He comes looking for you when you aren’t here. Is Professor Kenobi your boyfriend?”

  
“No, it’s nothing like that. We’re just friends.”

  
“I heard that you’re sleeping with him.”

And it’s like the lake trip silence after Tyler asked his rude question is falling all over you again. In a way, it’s true—you _have_ been sleeping with Obi-Wan Kenobi: the midnight or later FaceTime calls; the pallet of blankets and pillows by the fire that first night you sleep with your chest to his back, and at some point when your necks started to ache from the upright position, he shifted you both in your sleep to where he spooned you from behind; and when you shared the couch at the lake after fooling around on the dock.

“It’s not true,” you say firmly, but your coworker still looks skeptical so you ask, “where did you hear that?”

“Tyler from Delta told some of the guys that you told him and Alicia about it on your lake trip.”  
  
  


  
  
  



	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reader and our dear professor literally meet the climax of this story. Obi-Wan plays a song on the piano for her, which is 'River Flows In You' by Yiruma.
> 
> WARNING: This chapter includes PIV intercourse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right, my dudes. Here is the final chapter of Part I to ‘Borrowing Privileges’. Due to working full time at my university and still in the coursework phase of my PhD program, I will need to take a hiatus for a bit. I have a very demanding theory- and writing-heavy class that runs thru early July that must (regrettably) take precedent. Part II will begin shortly after my class ends on July 7. Thank you for following this story, and much love to you all.

\--

  
1

Obi-Wan returns to the library later in the afternoon, when you’re clocking out for the evening and you feel a tug of guilt in your stomach when you express silent gratitude over your coworker being long gone so they don’t see your professor come back. He’s back because it’s Thursday and because he takes you home on Thursdays. He’s standing with a book hugged to his chest and his cardigan folded against it, and his eyes shine as he watches you shut everything down, smoothing his hair back. You can tell that it’s damp—there’s been a bit of a heatwave in the afternoon. And you see where the sweat on his chest has soaked through the thin fabric of his white t-shirt. You also notice how he’s rolled his short sleeves up even more, and you can see the muscles in his bicep flex softly when he restlessly shifts his possessions around.

You wonder if this is the first time his tattoos have been visible to those still lingering around campus this late in the day. A pitiful ping of jealousy surges through you when you think that others may have seen the thing that you felt like had been just for you, and then you chide yourself for being so absurd.

“Hello there,” he says softly when you emerge from the circulation desk, and he lifts your bag from your hand and shoulders it, his book and cardigan falling to his hip, his free hand almost tracing the small of your back as a light force from his near-contact sweeps you out the doors and towards the parking garage he’s usually at.

He chatters lightly about his day, bemoaning the fact that he still hasn’t completed his annual administrative report, despite having been granted an extremely generous extension. You don’t say anything, and after he’s dumped his items into his car’s backseat—laying your bag down more gingerly—and you’re both in your usual seats, he frowns at you. “Are you all right?”

Like always, he doesn’t start the engine until you’ve clicked your seatbelt on. And like always, he fiddles with the radio and the vents. But this time, once his hand leaves the volume knob, you twist it in the opposite direction until his dashboard displays VOL 0.

“What is it?” He turns the engine off and shifts in his seat to face you.

“I,” you clear your throat. Your mouth is suddenly very dry. You see that your bottle of green tea is _still_ in his cupholder, and instead of cracking it open and taking a liberating sip, your chest stutters with an unnamable pain. Because he’s just so… _fucking sweet_ to you, and you can’t stand that he’s always doing small things like that for you. And the gossip you’ve heard has basically _ruined_ these gestures, making them feel sinful. Making you feel like you’ve done something wrong all along, when Obi-Wan is the only man whose ever made you feel so good and literally has never demanded or asked for anything from you at all, except to text him. Because he _likes_ chatting with you.

“What is it, darling? Tell me,” he says, pressing his fingers into your knee. You wrap your own around them and squeeze tightly, as if the motion could will the threatening sting of tears in the corners of your eyes. “Have I done something to make you uncomfortable? Or…unhappy?”

You turn your head from him, and focus instead on one of the concrete pillars in the parking garage, near the light that’s always flickering. “No. None of those things. It’s. I just. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to give me a ride home anymore. After today. Okay?”

He doesn’t say anything. His silence is too loud. You count five cars drive by to exit the parking garage while you’re sure his thoughts are chaotic swirls in his brilliant mind. Is that your heart beating in your ears, or his? “Why not?” He speaks it so low, so wounded, that it makes you flinch as though he shouted it at you.

You take a deep breath and tell him about the conversation with your coworker. About the gossip that’s been stirring around for days.

He slides his fingers from your grip and your chest hammers out a protest. He turns to face the wall in front of his windshield, and his fingers curl around his steering wheel. You take the opportunity to quickly rub at your eyes, and wipe the damp away on your shirt. “I do not scour my course lists for students to seduce,” he says, with a ferocity you’d never heard before. “And you were never in any of my courses to begin with.”

“I don’t think that matters. At this point.”

“Of course it _matters_!” The emotion behind the statement is raw, pleading. But still, he doesn’t shout. And still, the affective ache that courses throughout your body is too much and you feel your eyes sting again. “I never even _met_ you at school.”

You cover your face with both hands and then push them through your hair. “I’m just worried what they’re saying about you. I can get over what they say about me—they’ll find other things to gossip about soon enough.”

Obi-Wan is devastated. And angry. “Please don’t say things like that about yourself. I _know_ you care about yourself more than that.” He closes his eyes and starts the engine. “I don’t want to hear you say things like that again.”

You don’t say anything. Probably because you know he’s right.

He stews in silence until you’ve left campus entirely, and his pleading tone is back, “Can we please talk about this? I can take you home and we can talk there.”

“If we’re going to talk, let’s please go to your house. Alicia is going to be at mine, and so is everyone else.”

“I will do what I must.” And he says it with such finality, like a promise. 

2

“Sit with me,” he requests, after returning to you in the living room from changing into a dry shirt. His chambray shirt, from the night at the lake. His palm flat upon the space next to him. The bench is painted wood—you wonder if it was a gift, or perhaps something passed down to him from his father, and if the piano is too, but you don’t ask.

“Are you going to play something serious like Beethoven?” You ask, trying to lighten up the mood. Because the air is thick here—quite unlike any time you’ve spent together, apart from the times that the flirtations went too far and you both didn’t know how to handle the awkward silence that fell in between them.

  
“No,” he says seriously, and not in the way that precedes his typical dry humor. “Something about the twists of heartache that friendship can wrought.”  
  


You watch him lift the key cover with a delicate touch, and tap at some of the keys, letting the loose notes ring loudly and you feel them in your chest. He tilts his head and starts a melody—a short burst, then stops. He starts the same movement again, then stops. Just like the way he texts you: bubbles and stops, bubbles and stops. And just like the way he is with you when he is deep in thought and you must break him out of his silence to understand him.

“This is how I feel when you’re far away,” he says when the false starts are over, and the actual song is beginning. “When you’re close.” And it’s beautiful, just like his concentration, and an unreadable look on his face. “Elation.” His fingers are flying across the keys in a delicate tinkling, and then his wrists slow to a steadier and softer pace. “Devastation.” More tinkling, notes like tears, and his chest is heaving almost a harsh slew of breaths, his hair has fallen into his eyes with the effort. “A friendship that is frightening, and painful.” More slow notes. “A person I do not wish to be friends with.” He looks at you, not turning his body, hands still playing slow notes from memory.

“What are you thinking about?” You ask, with what feels like somebody else’s mouth.

His face grows stern as he continues the song, not answering you until its over. And he doesn’t answer you until he’s shut the key cover. “I’m thinking that…” He turns to where he is straddling the bench and you mirror him. “You are my girl,” he traces your cheek with the back of his hand and you shiver, the familiar warmth now threatening to swallow you from the inside out. “My little one...and I think you have been since the night we met.” He leans forward and kisses your forehead. “And I think you’ve known this for a very long time, too.” 

You go to say something, anything, not knowing what, but he silences you with a look.

“My heart cannot break any further if you insist that we are only friends. I want you to want me to love you.” His fingers have moved from your face and now trace a desperate line up your knee. “I’m thinking that I would very much like to share my bed with you right now, and love you there…if you’ll have me.”

You go to say something, anything, this time knowing it’s a string of logic you don’t believe in: _We can’t. The gossip. Our reputations. I want to; I want you._

“I don’t _care_ about what people are saying,” his voice is shaky here, like this is something he’s longed to say in all of the pauses and disruptions in his speech whether in person or over the phone somehow. “I don’t _care_ what they think. We can deal with that another time. If everyone thinks we’ve already done this, we should allow ourselves this gift. Not wretchedly, like they believe, but wonderful. I am in love with you, and I cannot be your friend anymore. Or at least, _only_ your friend.”

“Yes,” you somehow managed, not hearing it, but he does, and he’s already on his feet and grabbing your hand to pull you up beside him, taking you further down his hall, past his bathroom, and into the place he disappeared to the first night you were here.

“This is my bedroom,” he says leaning into the door, almost stumbling into it when he tries to open it for you, and lets you walk ahead, into the room. His room. Where he goes every night. Where he’s at when he’s happy, or sad; sick or well; when he’s getting dressed or undressed, when he...

He follows you in and shuts the door, pressing his back into it. He watches you take an inventory of everything inside. His cardigan is splayed at the foot of his bed and he gathers it up, folds it and tosses it onto his desk in the corner. His bed rests on smooth wooden pallets, with light glowing softly from between the planks. A string of fairy lights are threaded above his wooden headboard. He shuffles past you and goes to unplug them, almost knocking over the dracaena.

  
“Sorry.” He steadies the plant.

  
“No you don’t have to do that,” you say too quickly, meaning the lights. “I have some like that, too. Not the same but close.” You’re ranting because you don’t know what else to do, but you want to stall.   
  
“I made all of this,” he says gesturing towards the pallets. “The crafting doesn’t stop with the throw blankets, I’m afraid.” His smile is nervous and his face is open, following you around like a second shadow.

  
“It’s really cozy,” you admit. And it is—the mess of books, the mess of clothes, the mess of throw blankets all over his bed (he doesn’t have ‘real’ bedding, it seems), the many throw pillows all over his bed; writing utensils and papers and candy wrappers, and plants, and music playing softly from the Echo that has half a shirt draped over it.

  
But he looks embarrassed. “The plants are all fake except a few of the succulents,” he admits. His fingers nip at one of them, as if to prove his point.   
  
“They’re adorable.”  
  
“I painted this,” he says, almost quickly, trying to air out the awkwardness trying to seep into your pause. He shows you the lantern at the end of the pallet. “Sometimes I put those little tea lights in them?”  
  
“I know what you mean.”  
  
“I also did this,” he gets down on both knees to show you where certain parts of the pallet slide open like dresser drawers. They’re filled with his eclectically colored and patterned socks and underwear. There’s also some sweaters you’ve never seen him in because they’re for the wintertime. “I’ve been wanting to get some more vines to drape everywhere else,” he says, pushing himself back to his feet, and waves his hand in several directions.  
  
“That would be nice,” you somehow manage.

He sits on the middle of his bed, legs crossed, and cradles Grumbis in his lap and watches you pad around his room peeking into his closet that’s ajar: there are piles of clothes just stuffed in there.  
  
“That’s stuff I don’t wear.”  
  
“I can tell.”  
  
His desk doesn’t have much—eyeglass cleaner, his grading stuff actually neat now, his iPad and laptop charging—but you trace your finger across it when you walk by. There’s a small bookshelf that you eye and he tells you, “Those were my father’s books or the ones he gave to me”. Your fingers trace the length of the spines and stop at the foot of his bed. You both look at one another for a while not sure what to do next.  
  
“This is Grumbis,” he finally says, and you blink at him, swallowing a laugh, from the foot of the bed, _his_ bed.  
  
“Yes we’ve met virtually.” You offer a small smile and crawl onto his bed with him, matching his sitting position. He scoots closer to you until your knees touch. You reach out and touch Grumbis—he feels exactly how you’d imagined: hard and soft, fluffy, and worn out with love.  
  
Obi-Wan sighs, “I’m nervous.”  
  
“I know. Me too.”  
  
It’s hard to believe that his sure hands, lithe and swift and so well practiced are hiding in a pillow most likely meant for children when only moments ago they were demonstrating their deft and dexterous mastery to you by song. His confession, purged from his chest, left swirling in your head along with tinkling notes that make your breath still catch, and his bright eyes one last gleam of...something. Hope? Or love?  
  
You grab his face and lean into him, kissing him the way you’ve wanted to for days and probably since the first night you met. Grumbis presses into the softness of your belly and Obi-Wan’s fingertips gently go to your throat tracing lines downward until his hands rest on your shoulders.  
  
He pushes you away gently, and unzips Grumbis’s mouth, and you think he’s about to give you or himself a mint or a piece of candy when he instead pulls out a wrapped condom. He holds it delicately, eyes boring into yours. He places it on your leg before taking Grumbis and hurling him across the room, and into his closet with a muttered apology. You hear a torrid of Hi Chews pelt the hardwood floor, and the sound of Grumbis’s metal zip smacking against the closet door.

Obi-Wan takes the condom and places it on top of one of his pillows (the baker’s dozen of throw pillows fall onto the floor in one fell swoop), and he catches you around your waist and pulls you back and back with him until you’re resting on his chest. Just like the time you were together at the lake house. But this time, you fall not in a sleep position, but in a kiss that guides his hand up your shirt to rest on your bare hip. And you’re now straddling him, working to undo his chambray shirt buttons and don’t stop until it falls open, revealing his gift of skin and hairs and scars and bruises to you.

He’s even more gorgeous now than the night you lay together at the docks, the sunset just outside his window lighting everything up and the fairy lights showing you the sweet look of rapt attention on his face. Your fingers splay into his stubble (well, his beard, now growing back with a vengeance so it seems) and he rolls you over to where he’s the one leaning over you and working the buttons on your flannel. Your palm goes to his forehead and you brush his fringe back and away from his eyes and he nuzzles into your hand until he can kiss your wrist.

“I’ve waited here for you every night.”

“Obi-Wan,” you manage. It’s a choked sound, and his weight above you is too much. Your heart is hammering, and you might die before anything else happens.

“Every night of my life, it’s felt like.”

You lift up the best you can and kiss him slowly, opening his mouth with your tongue, kissing him with a feral wetness you’ve been craving, and push his shirt off his shoulders. He tugs yours away and it disappears into a black hole. He presses himself against you and you cry out at feeling his hardness, and his hand grips your bare hip, his lips grazing where your neck meets your shoulder. He bites down softly when he feels your hands drop to his jeans and begin working the button, the zip, and he gasps hard when your palm presses into his underwear. You feel a damp spot through the fabric, and you can’t take it and grab his face in your hands, fingers digging into his beard and kiss him fully, desperately. He manages to push his jeans off, his underwear going with them, and in one fell swoop, pulls your shorts and panties away like a magician and his tablecloth trick.

He sits back on his knees, breathless, hair in his face, chest heaving. His hands are shaking so hard with the condom now that you have to sit up help him open it, soothing him, “It’s okay. Calm down,” and when it’s on, he’s still on his knees, and he’s pressing his forehead onto yours, trying to will you on your back.   
  


He leans to the side, over the mattress, and grabs a small bottle that he’s placed on one of the pallet slats earlier, at another time, and you flush with a new kind of excitement at the thought that he keeps it there for touching himself. A deeper and needier wave hits you when you think he may have put it there for _you_ , anticipating this to happen at some point.

“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” he says, snapping it open with his thumb.

And you feel your legs go weak watching him drip a line down his length and oh God the way he shudders when he rubs it in, first with his palm flat, then with his fist wrapped around his shaft. And when he uses that same hand to cover your vulva to spread some of the leftover lube into your folds, your moan is absolutely feral. Obi-Wan is delighted.

You see him swallow hard and his neck tenses. He wipes his hand dry on his chest, looking down at you, eyes hot and hard and soft and kind, “I adore you.” And you see the hairs go damp and bright when his hand pulls away. He moves towards you and presses you backwards until he’s above you and lining himself up at your entrance. “It’s been a very, very long time for me.”

  
“Me too.”

  
And then. And then. And then.

You, stretching open as he nudges his way in, just the tip, and your exhales turn heavy and shallow immediately upon contact, his hardness the pressure you’ve been searing for and searching for. And his hand spreading out, palm flat, where your mound meets your lower belly, the pressure from his hand is too much, the pressure from his deeply retrained thrusts into you as he works you open for him, and you clench and feel a pool of warmth meet his length and he groans. There’s a snag, a stop, and his forehead crashes into yours, his fringe pressed into your skin, his nose poking into your eye, a husky, whispered “Sorry”.

More pressing, more stretching, a cry you’re sure _cannot_ be coming from _your_ throat, heat from the friction, from his thick cock, feeling all of his ridges against your walls. Him pressing your legs further apart, and the rest of him slips in snug, his tip licking hot against the spot deep inside of you: once familiar only before with his fingers. And he stops, he stills, when his pelvis is pressed into yours, impossibly close, and his eyes flutter open. His forehead is damp, his chest is heaving, his fingers stuttering into your hair to pull you into a sweet kiss.

And you look up at him, your fingers splayed across his cheek. He captures your hand and kisses your fingertips, eyes burning aquamarine and never leaving you. And he just looks at you, and looks at you, until his arms are around your waist and shoulders. He pulls you up to him, and up, settling you into his lap. Neither of you move, and he kisses you again and your hands go into his hair while his explore your chest and your back, his fingernails dragging down the small of your back until you’re squirming against him and he whispers your name like it’s the only one in his vocabulary.

His nose finds your neck and then so do his tongue and teeth and lips, his breath hot on the sweat that’s broken out on you there, while he places languid open mouth kisses on your skin, and you rut against him, earning a tender moan from his throat that spills out far more beautifully than any of his musical performance. So, you do it again, and again, and once more, until he’s pushing you back into his pillows with a kind laugh, and then pushing into your walls with a heavy pace, rocking deep into you when his hips meet yours with each thrust. The stimulation is almost too much and you whine, eyes shutting and your head helplessly turns to the side.  
  
He presses his nose into your hair and murmurs words of encouragement and you feel each syllable as they leave his chest, “Come for your professor, my dear one.” A kiss, and fingers pressing into your throat softly. “I want to feel you come all over me, my sweet angel. My darling girl.”

But you gently push him away and then are riding him with your hands on his chest, fingers splayed through his nestling of golden red hair. He takes one of your hands and kisses your palm, the inside of your wrist, before threading your fingers together in a tight grip that binds all the words you don’t say—all the promises filled in your hearts and finally, finally spilling out now. He stretches his, and so too, your, arm up like you’re pinning him down. The back of his hands and knuckles softly knock onto his bed’s wooden headboard, light rapping and tapping singing out the rhythm of your hips. His other hand caresses your cheek, and he pulls you in for a kiss, your name falling softly, and spilling into your mouth when you open herself to him. He gasps when you moan his name into his mouth, and press your foreheads together, your noses nuzzling tenderly and pressing hard into one another.

“Obi-Wan,” you cry out in a hoarse whisper. He’s hitting that spot deep inside again with a thick sort of thrumming, but with a burning fullness that makes you whine and cry out in a strangled sound you’ve _never_ made. For anyone. But this is Obi-Wan Kenobi, and you’re here, fitted inside and around him, tying yourself to his heart, and yours is shattering with something indescribable.  
  
“Tell me, my darling,” he says, fingers digging into your hips as he guides you to stay steady on him.

  
You move your hand from its sweat-stuck spot on his slick chest, and press your fingers into his beard, up the line of his jaw, cupping his face in your hand and he closes his eyes, long eyelashes fluttering shut in an adorable manner. You feel a coiling that suggests a promise of something wonderful approaching you, and your eyes shut tight.

“Look at me,” he pleads.

In your clasped hands, his fingers press into the back of your hand like a bolded punctuation mark to his request, letting go and covering your hand that’s on his chest, pressing tightly. “I love you—” he starts, but you’re crying out,  
  
“I’m coming, Obi-Wan,” you plead softly, needing him to steady you, to anchor you.  


He lets go of both your hands and sits up, pulling you flush against his damp chest, cradling you. “Tell me, my darling one,” he grunts this out, a demand, a sloppy kiss, his entire mouth covering yours, your hardened nipples etching your bodies’ entwined movements into his skin, him pushing you over the edge.

“Obi-Wan,” you cry out in a pained voice, louder than the sweet whispers and soft moans when he was delicate and not so deep. You shut your eyes, and your jaw drops open when your breathing becomes too erratic.  
  
“Look at me, little one.” He’s out of breath, too, and he looks amazing: his cheeks are flushed, there are drops of sweat sliding from his neck to his collarbone, his hair plastered over his forehead.

  
You open your eyes, and he sees unshed tears welled up in the corners. He kisses the corners of your eyes and feels you clench and flutter around him, pulsing tightly and drawing out something like a low bellow from some place inside him that’s never been unearthed until this moment.   
  
“I never,” you start, as if to apologize for your noise, and he kisses you like the first time, rocking you in his lap while you ride out the aftershock, throwing your arms around his neck and hugging him tightly, trembling.

“You did beautifully, my darling girl,” he whispers against your neck.

“It’s all for you,” you say into his hair. “Everything. No one has ever. I never.” You pull back, and his eyes soften at the look of pure adoration coming from you, your heat. And in this moment, in his vulnerability, you know that he feels fully sewn into your soul.  
  
His palm is flat against the small of your back and his other hand cupped around the hollow of your neck, his thumb tracing the line of her bottom lip. His auburn hair is falling into his intense eyes, your hands brushing the wet strands of fringe away so all of him can see all of you.

His rocking turns less tender and more desperate and like a pinch he’s hit your sensitive and overstimulated spot again. “I am in love with you,” your murmur against his thumb before kissing it. “I’ve loved you since that first night you brought me home.”  
  
His thumb moves to your cheekbone and he kisses you hard, teeth tugging gently at your bottom lip before kissing you sweetly in apology, soothing you. He easily angles you to where you’re on your back now, hips tilted for him to fit snugly and all the way flush. His sweaty, too-hot weight above you, feeling like a dangerous love that you don’t want to let go of—something that will quickly turn into an unhinged obsession, a visceral need to have him. He smoothes your hair from your face, and shakes his out of his eyes until you comb it back for him with her fingers. He drops down to his forearms and traces his spread fingers down your cheek looking right into your eyes. “I am your home now.”  
  
“Obi-Wan,” you breathe and card your fingers in his damp hair, pulling him close to run the tip of your nose over his ear. “Obi-Wan, harder, please, I’m coming again,” and your legs tighten around of him, his hand running up the side of your thigh, holding you tightly.

  
He takes your direction, snaking his palm under the small of your back and you arch into him crying out harder to match his pressure. His other hand never leaves your face, his thumb tracing the curve if your lower lip until he can’t concentrate on that anymore and presses his forehead into yours, and his gentle cry when he lets go pulls from his chest and up his throat and falls against your neck and the sound makes you want to sob.

He rolls you over, sliding from you, and you whine at the immediate emptiness that you feel, you resting on top of him, just like the night at the lake. His thigh is warm between your legs, and he cradles you to his chest that rumbles out, “You’d better fall asleep soon—I daresay I don’t have it in me to read tonight.”

\--


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reader contemplates our dear professor in the wee hours of the morning after their first time together; Reader has a flashback (/deleted scene/) to an intimate moment with our dear professor; Reader and Obi-Wan are interrupted by a friend; and Obi-Wan takes Reader out shopping for one of his hobbies.
> 
> Rating: Filth! Explicit! 18+! Mature!

\--

‘Recall Requests**’  
Or, ‘Borrowing Privileges’, Part II

**adj.: a recall request is a library procedure that allows patrons to request an item be held for them to pick up upon its return.

—

1

You wake up early, and confused, because you’re hot. Like, _sweating_. And you wake up to these dimmed lights but with the sky still black—it must be the few hours before dawn. And when you go to grab your phone in a groggy way, you find that you can’t because someone else’s weight is on you. And you flush hard when you realize that you’re naked, and he’s naked, and you feel a giddy embarrassment when you remember who it is and why you’re both in this position. This is the reason why you’re sweating: the grown man pressed into you, his leg wrapped over yours, and his face buried in the crook of your neck, and one of his arms pressed between the small of your back and the mattress, and his other arm slung over your middle and his large, warm palm softly covering your breast. He grunts softly when he feels you stir and presses his sleep-sweat slicked body into yours further, kissing you in his sleep before nuzzling his nose into that spot. His scruff scratches at you and he hums in contentment when one of your hands cradles his head, your fingers splayed through his hair. It’s damp at the nape of his neck and you smile against the bit of his forehead close to your lips.

So, this finally happened. What would the morning be like? He’d given you no indication—he’d fallen asleep on your chest almost immediately after you’d both cleaned up and settled down back into his sheets. But if it was anything like the night you’d spent after the storm and after the shower, it would be familiar and sweet: coffee, feeding the ducks, and then breakfast.

Your fingers tug at his locks lazily, running your fingertips over his scalp and he all but coos into your neck and squeezes your breast gently in his sleep and another sleepy kiss, followed by a near unintelligible, ‘love’. Was a first time with your two previous boyfriends ever like this? In the act and the hours after? The first one, no—you had both been virgins, trying to figure out how to use your bodies. The other boyfriend, the one throughout most of college, wasn’t much more experienced than that and neither were you. But, had any other form of love besides full-blown penetrative sex been like it’s been with Obi-Wan? No to those, either. There was the touches in his car; the shower; the first time he touched you on the lake trip with your friends.

And there had been the second lake trip. The one that you tried very hard not to think about before sleeping with him tonight. The trip that felt like everything had changed on a dime, and the trip that you felt like you couldn’t bring up in conversation because you were afraid of what it meant. So, the denial continued. For far too long—until it hurt his feelings and all but broke his heart. Which you will wholeheartedly apologize for later.

The lake trip where he wanted to have a ‘reset’ of the initial trip you took with your friends. The ‘make up’ trip this time around had been for just the two of you. He’d told you about this cabin in the woods that his father and HIS father built together so long ago, and how he usually spends his weekends in the summer time up there. He asked if you could take a long weekend, and you could. So you both did.

So after work on a Friday, you followed him to his car like you do on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But this time you’d both packed weekend bags that he somehow managed to fit into his backseat. He’d removed the shelving from inside the small bookshelf (but not the bookshelf itself), and that’s where he tucked your bags.

Thoughts of your make up trip fill your head in the early hours of the morning—before the sun rises, still—like this:

2

The cabin is adorable, and like the one you stayed in with your friends, it has a spacious back yard that leads to a private dock. He tells you that he sold the boat after his father passed, but he hoped to get another one soon because he does miss sailing around the expansive lake. There was a small garden that hadn’t been looked after in some time, he told you, because the rabbits and squirrels ate everything, which he of course delighted in. The inside of the cabin reminded you so strongly of those ‘tiny houses’ that you’d seen on the internet before. A small, cozy space where everything had a purpose and everything functioned efficiently to made due with the small space: a kitchen and living room; a wood burning stove; a full bathroom; a writing desk; and of course built in bookshelves. Above head, a loft.

Once you’ve dropped your bags inside and put away the groceries, Obi-Wan tells you that he thought you could hang out on the dock and enjoy fishing, even though you probably wouldn’t catch anything. Outside, he sets up two camping chairs on the dock, and you both fish for hours, sometimes drinking out of the same beer bottle instead of opening up a new one a piece. When you tire of this, you go back to the house and help one another in the kitchen to prepare dinner.

You build a fire pit close to the lake’s edge, and you bring dinner outside, and when you’re both finished eating, he reads to you until the sun goes down and then its too dark even bu the burning ember in the pit to see the pages. You extinguish the fire, and go inside. He lays the book down on the dining room table and excuses himself to go change out of his clothes—he climbs the ladder up into the loft, and you disappear into the bathroom on the main floor to change into your pajamas. You bought them especially for this trip—your evening attire consisted of leggings and loose t-shirts. But, you wanted to be adorable for him. So, you found a silken set: sea-foam green silken shorts decorated with small avocados cut in half; the shirt, the same, except the a larger avocado with a smiley face and the printed words ‘I’M A NUT’ arched around it. Once you’re changed, you don’t know what to do with yourself so you stand awkwardly in the middle of the small living room, your bare feet sunken into the soft rug spread out over the harder and sometimes-uneven wooden floor.

You watch Obi-Wan carefully climb back down the ladder, looking very much like a little boy at summer camp climbing down from a bunkbed and you have to stop yourself from making an obnoxious squealing sound that could alarm him.

He spins around with a dramatic flourish and tugs at the hem of his sleep shirt, stretching it out to show you, “Do you like his? I bought it special for our trip.”

_Our_ trip. Not _the_ trip.

“No you didn’t!”

“I did, too,” he lets go of it. It is very adorable, and he looks so boyish in it. It is a blue thing with buttons and a collar and a breast pocket. It is trying to be a short sleeved button down shirt, but it is silk, like yours. And his sleep pants are also shorts. “Look at this,” he tells you, shoving both hands in the short’s pockets. He pulls out a Hi-Chew candy from each, and offers you one. He tears his open with his teeth while watching you open yours like a less ravage person. He tucks the wrapper back in his pocket and chews thoughtfully while watching you toss yours into a nearby small bin.

“I will tell you,” he says once he’s finished staring at you while eating his candy. “That the only proper bed is the one up there. I threw Dad’s out after he passed. But the sofa has a pullout—”

“That’s fine. I’ve slept on floors before.”

“No, I was telling you that you can have the bed up there,” his fingers are in his hair again, pushing it around even though its not in the way at all.

And the boldness. Like the night of the storm and the shower. “Why can’t we share the good bed?”

His fingers stop, but the one does trace a nervous line over and over again across the arch of his eyebrow. “I don’t...I didn’t bring you here to...trick you into bed with me.”

And the boldness, exciting you, literally moving you to get closer to him and you grab his wrist to stop this fretting over his eyebrow. And something you never thought you’d do—which happens more and more with him, you’ve discovered—you press a kiss across the padding of this finger and then catch it with your lower lip before swiping your tongue across it. His mouth opens, and he either gasps or hisses, and you squeeze his wrist softly before taking more of his finger into your mouth. He lets out a little whine and his long eyelashes flutter shut in a flash of golden red, and his other hand moves towards his shorts, pressing against his rapidly hardening cock with his palm, as though trying to push it away or will it away. He moans deeply when the tip of your tongue flits over and around his finger and he withdraws it from your mouth and grabs your chin, tracing his thumb over your lower lip before leaning in for a soft kiss. He mumbles against you, “You’ve convinced me, darling. We can share.”

He lets you climb up first, and it really is such a small space. Just a mattress with simple hunter green sheets and many pillows. The wooden railing really is like a bunk bed. The ceiling is slanted and closer than it should be, so you’re careful not to hit your head and you settle back upon the full sized mattress, trying to make room for him. And he comes up, bent forward and falls over you, catching himself on his elbows, and your fingers splay through his beard and you pull him to your mouth, opening him up for you and meeting his tongue with yours. His fingertips trace an electric line from your cheek to your jaw, shivers follow their wake as they move down your neck and you feel your nipples pearling from this delicate touch and his hips are pressed into you again, just like the first time. And he is hard against you, through his shorts, just like the first time. But now, there was no sound of lapping water or the wind—only a distant owl and the cicadas and crickets. And his even more delicate mewling sounds.

And all if the familiarity has you so wet you should be embarrassed. His weight over you; you unbuttoning his shirt in a steady frenzy until it hangs open to frame his bare chest; the familiar, lingering scent of sunscreen applied hours ago; and his fingers creeping up and under the hemline of your sleep shirt until his warm palm is pressed firmly against your middle, and his mouth is finding yours again after every time it disappears to cover your ear or your throat.

When he is laving at your collarbone where his fingers are tugging your shirt collar low for access, you pant out, “I bought these for our trip, too.” You mean your sleep clothes.

When he pulls back to face you, flushed and panting and hair wild, eyes wild, he said (strangely calmly), “Though this jimjam shirt is quite adorable, I think you need to take it off.” And his fingertips move from your collar over and all the way down to the hemline again. His eyes, burning aquamarine and dark, and like flared glass, he pressed your shirt up, bunching it just under your breasts and leans forward to kiss your stomach, his hair dangling and whispering against your exposed skin.

“You’re going to have to do it, I dont think I can move,” you somehow manage and theres all his teeth again, in that smile, and in one fell swoop, he frees you of your shirt and tosses it over the wooden railing. His palm roves over your stomach in soft, palm-flat circles, and move up and up, his eyes still locked onto yours, “Tell me to stop and I promise I will.”

“Don’t.”

He presses his hips into you harder and cups one of your breasts before lowering himself over you again, this time pressing feather kisses over the soft skin and breathing you in. You arch your back into him and tug at his hair when he traces your nipple first with his lower lip and then the tip of his tongue—matching your earlier action against his finger—before taking you into his mouth and suckling before running the flat of his tongue over and over until a soft moan escapes you and you cry out his name, grabbing his ass and spreading your legs to pull him closer into you. He rocks into you gently while giving your other breast such careful attention, and tracing your bottom lip with his other thumb for you to take into your mouth while he suckles harder against this nipple and pulling back with a delightful friction that shocks your hips into bucking against him. He pulls his thumb from your mouth and grabs your hip to still you and presses his bare chest into your bare chest and kisses you with a soft urgency, like he’s putting his entire body into it, and you push his sleep shirt off his shoulders and he throws it over the railing, too.

He moved back, kneeling in front of you, and digs his fingers under the waistband of your shorts. “May I?”

You can only nod dumbly up at him. And then they’re gone, and his thumbs are hooked into his own waistband and his tongue darts over his lower lip and he looks at you, flushed and blushing, and almost shy. “May I take mine off, too?”

You must give him a look that asks if he’s insane, or that tells him you couldn't possibly believe he could ask such a dumb question because he all but claws them off and throws them to the side too.

And then, there is is: both if you quite literally laid out bare in front of one another. And you finally see it, his cock, looking down the length of your body at it: hard and glistening at the tip, but warm and soft you imagine, and you have a little sharp intake of breath at the sight. You feel your mouth slightly open (and feel it slightly watering at the thought of taking him into your mouth) but you feel a tiny frown etching its way across your features as you’re struck silent thinking about how you aren’t quite sure about the size of it and fitting—

And he watches you looking at it. And then he leans into you again, and gently presses the pad of his thumb to the frown crease, as though he’s trying to wipe it away. And he reassures you by saying, “Don’t worry; we can work up to it, I won’t hurt you. I promise.” When he pulls back, he does that thing with his palm again, pushing against it, trying to will it away. “I just want to touch you right now if that’s okay.”

You don’t even know how to convey how okay this is, especially verbally. You only spread your legs wider for him and his fingers are pressing into your inner thighs, pushing them open wider still.

“I just want to see you,” his fingers tracing small lines that make you shiver and he smiles a little when he sees the wet spot you’ve left on his bedding. Its a prideful thing, that he could make you do that so quickly.“So pretty,” and he lowers his body over yours again and you shudder helplessly over the return of his warmth; over his cock pressed into your leg (and yes it is hard and soft and warm and wet), and his palm covers your mound just as neatly as his mouth covers where your neck meets your shoulder and as his tongue runs flat over the skin there, his thumb runs a tentative circle over your clit and you buck against him, and he presses his wet cockhead into your leg, and presses more firm swirling circles over your clit, and his middle finger presses a firm rhythm against the entrance of your cunt. “You’re so wet for me, aren’t you, darling?” He coos against your neck, kissing it softly, pressing his finger into you with ease and you cry out his name in an embarrassing strangled tone. Before his finger goes all the way in, a second one joins and then he’s buried in you and moving against the spot deep inside of you that you’ve literally ached to feel him reach again since the first time, and you fist his hair as desperately as that first time.

“Do you think you can take three?” He asks deftly against your mouth once his lips find yours again and you manage,

“God, yes.”

He pulls the two out, and the pressure of three feels like it’s going to be too much, that you may not be able to take it, but you think about the girth of his cock pressed against you, and you think about his words earlier—“we’ll work up to it”—and you’ve never wanted to risk being hurt more in your life, as you angle your hips for him, and he presses in, and you clutch at his shoulders, your fingers digging into him. And you moan into each other’s mouths when he presses them in as far as he can reach. The pain from the stretch ebbs away, but returns sometimes, but as you feel distinct fluttering, almost micro-orgasms, one of your hands flies to your clit as you work yourself, and all of his attention turns to his three fingers in you, and the flat of his palm pressed just above your mound. And his hair is in his face, and his eyes are on you, and you’re trying to keep your eyes open, but like a sneeze coming, you can’t help shutting them. He watches your mouth open, your jaw drop, by every atomic millimeter, and catches your silent scream in his mouth, swallowing his name with it, and a litany of curse words. He withdraws from you when your hips cease riding the after-waves out, and he collapses on his side next to you, as though spent, as well, and pulls you into his chest to soothe you, stroking your hair, and telling you, “You are such a good girl, my little one. You took me so well.” And then he’s cooing over you, fussing over you. “You came so hard for me, didn’t you?” You can only helplessly bury your face in his chest and nod against him, hug him tighter. And he pulls you closer, “Well, my little one better get to sleep. You must be exhausted.”

And he must have been exhausted, too, (from elation) because he follows right behind you with sleep.

—

You both wake up in the early morning hours spooning, he is behind you and he is softly stroking your hair and gently kissing your shoulders and neck - not with the intention of waking you up per say, but rather just luxuriating in your presence. You stir and turn your head back to kiss him on the mouth, and he trails his hands all over the front of your body, slowly heating the both of you up.

Its like he can’t help the way he presses his cock to your ass to seek some relief, and he moves his hand down to slowly stroke your folds and he gasps softly when he finds you soaked enough that your slickness is leaking into the juncture of your thighs. He pulls one of your legs slightly to the side so he can keep stroking you nice and slow, paying attention to your face and your sounds to see what you like best and when you start to get impatient for more and your hand snakes awkwardly up his thigh in a desperate attempt to grab his cock, he takes his hand away and reaches down to stick his cock into that wet juncture from behind and starts thrusting into and out slowly, while moving his fingers back to your clit. Eventually he starts moving his hips faster and faster and stroking you in time with his thrusts and you opens your legs just enough to reach your hand down and use your palm to push his cock into your folds deeper, still sliding his length through them. This drives Obi-Wan wild and he puts his hand over yours to help and you are just rocking together as his cock slides in and out - all the way from the juncture of you ass in back near your entrance to the front, so the tip of his cock keeps brushing your clit. Obi-Wan has his face buried between your shoulder blades, just panting on your skin and giving you little kisses and you have your other hand back in his hair and in between soft sighs, you tell him quietly, “You make me feel so good Obi; so good all the time,” and you are both so close and he says “You are so beautiful dear one, you’re doing so good,” andcan barely even respond and licks the skin between your shoulder blades to taste the salt of your sweat and just you and everything is so wet and so frantic and you are both pressing him into you and he takes his hand to steady you both and keep your bodies tightly pressed and his hand is coated in your wetness and he puts his palm flat onto your chest and you can feel him rubbing it on your skin there—his precome and your arousal mixed together—and during one of the last strokes the tip of his cock just barely slides into you and you both go crazy at the sensation and then you come together.

3

Something about the lake trip memory satisfies you so much to where you’re able to go back to sleep with Obi-Wan cradled into your chest. You don’t know how you’re able to sleep through the rest of the night with how hot the room is, but you do.

And you spend the weekend with Obi-Wan and most of it is spent in bed, learning what each others bodies were for and how you fit so well into one another.

But this morning is different, because you’ve backed him into the chair he keeps at his desk in his room until he’s sitting on it, fully clothed and obviously nervous. HIs fingers fly to his shirt buttons and he swallows hard, letting them loose, letting himself be able to breathe better.

“Come here, darling,” he says, almost a whisper and he catches you around your waist and pulls you down. You straddle one of his legs and wrap your arms around his neck. He bites your exposed shoulder before you grab his face, his stubble burning your hands and you pull him i to a sloppy kiss, tongues first. He opens himself to you and traces the bottom of your tongue with the tip of his and yours draws a line over the roof of his mouth. His hands grip your hips and he grinds his hard cock into your thigh through his jeans. His desperate mewl is divine and his praise is muffled,

“I love having you in my lap like this.”

You rock softly against him, digging into his knee and he catches your gasp before it can escape your mouth. His fingertips creep up your belly and trace up to your sternum, under your bra, and his moan is loud and makes you feel dizzy when he cups your breast with a firm squeeze before pinching your pebbles nipple between two fingers. His other hand leaves your hip and those fingertips fall onto the waistband of your panties. “Take these off for me.” He helps you, starting to peel them, and the drop around your ankle in a whisper. You tug them free from around your ankle and ball them up with one and and stuff them into the breast pocket of his denim shirt. He loses it and all but rips your shirt off, throwing it into oblivion and begins working on the back clasp to your bra as you begin working yourself and your hips over his clothed leg, your core hot and wet. His eyelashes flutter as he watches you and his eyes shine in mirth when he sees, “My poor sweet one, you’ve messed my trousers.” You feel yourself furiously flush at the purr in his throat and feel like a completely inexperienced and shy school girl when he pushes first your bra straps over your shoulder, leaving a scratchy kiss on each before ridding you of the garment entirely. “I should like to see you ruin this leg,” he murmurs, eyes going dark as one hand grips your thigh almost painfully, and the other gently leads one of your breasts to his eager mouth where he kisses first the soft curves of skin before running his hot tongue and heavy breath over your nipple, then grazing the overly sensitive bud with his teeth before sucking hard. You wrap your arms around his shoulders to steady yourself, and push your breast further into his mouth and he takes you tenderly, eagerly.

“Obi-Wan,” you cry out, not sure if you screamed his name or cooed it. Your hands are shaking and your hips are desperate and the leg of his trousers are soaked. 

Your trembling hands fall to his lap and you make quick fumbling work of his button and zipper, chest aching with want and a frenzied desire because you know he’s not wearing underwear and you would soon be greeted by his gorgeous and swollen cock.

But he stands, and you whimper when your core is without this desperate and delicious friction, and he nudges you towards his bed. When the backs if your knees hit it, you stumble down and watch him drop his pants with a fierce tug, his shirt ripped off quickly after, his hair a mess, his eyes wild. He runs his warm hands up your shaking thighs and he pulls you up and to him only for him to turn you delicately and then push you to your elbows over the edge of his bed. His hand presses into your lower back, fingers digging into your skin, almost kneading it, and your nipples grow even harder with such a sensual touch and reach.

You gasp loudly, loudly when you feel the swell of something all too warm slip between your slick folds and press at your entrance.

“I have loved you before,” he says, breathing turning shallow, his hand continuing its delicate and tender ministrations on your back. “But right now, I shall fuck you.” And when he pushes into you, his entire gifted length and girth, you really do yell out his name and when he grabs your hips to pull you even more flush to him , your shouted, “Fuck!” drives him to start pounding into your haunches with a fervor you didn’t know he possessed.

His hands find your breasts again, and he palms them, pulling you up and up, your back pressed against his chest and you can feel the hairs on it whisper across your shoulder blades and when he bites down, hard, where your neck meets your shoulder, claiming you, he inhales sharply through his nose, and groans your name deftly against your skin. His free hand spreads across your mound, reaching for your clit and

His doorbell rings.

He stops, and looks at you when you turn your neck the best you can to meet his clouded gaze thats slowly focusing back into clarity.

You both wait, and nothing. So he starts again, deep strokes that make the spot inside of you ache and you feel a pool of warmth coat him and he bites you again.

Doorbell doorbell doorbell.

Obi-Wan waits. You push your hips back against him and he pushes into you.

Knocking and the voice od Mace yelling out, “Kenobi!”

A last wistful pump from Obi-Wan that lingers, and your whine over him withdrawing is silenced by more shouting from Mace Fucking Windu:

“I know you’re home, Kenobi—I can see your car.”

Obi-Wan stops entirely and kisses you almost roughly from his frustration when you’re facing him. He pulls a shirt on and tugs his jeans on without any underwear, which drives you wild, knowing that the inside of his jeans are now lined with you, and you start dressing quickly.

Turns out he’s pulled your shirt on by mistake. It’s the shirt from the night at bar where you met Mace after graduation. Obi-Wan realizes this once he’s opening the front door, and when the buttons don’t quite reach, and he answers the door trying to pull the sides to his chest to wrap around his frame.

“I guess I’ve…come…at a bad time?” Mace says eyeing, Obi-Wan’s flushed face, and his hair that’s been spread all over by your fingertips and fistfuls of desire and passion. His hands fly to his hair and the shirt—your shirt—falls open as he tries to bring some order to his layers.

“Its fine” he says gruffly. “What is it?”

“You weren’t at the department wide meeting this morning,” Mace says easily enough, like he’s sharing the weather. “And you haven’t answered phone calls…voicemails…emails…texts. Carrier pigeon.” His lips turn up at this, amused at his own wit.

“It’s Monday?” Obi-Wan asks, a little out of breath, pulling the shirt around him, but it won’t budge much more. His biceps scream against the fabric.

“Monday, indeed.” Mace is loving this—his eyes say so.

“Oh dear.” Obi-Wan’s hand finds his scruff and runs his fingers through it thoughtfully.

“I can tell them I came to visit and found you ill...indisposed. I won’t say by what. Or by whom, I guess I should say.” his eyes flicker over Obi-Wan’s shoulder and sweep around the room as if scanning to catch the culprit—you—and you (and Obi-Wan) wondering if he had an idea it was indeed you.

“Very well,” Obi-Wan concedes, but you can hear the discomfort in his tone—lying, so dishonorable.

“It’s not like you to miss things without sending a notification to us beforehand. I’m sure its fine. It bored me to tears. Anyway...I trust that you had a very good reason to lose track of your weekend.”

Obi-Wan self-consciously wraps your shirt around himself again, and doesn’t say anything when Mace takes his leave. He locks the door.

He returns to you sitting sweetly on the edge of his bed. Wet panties cold against your vulva, his shirt dangling open and around your breasts and he eyes the pocket where he knows you dug your panties from. And he stirs.

“Its a bit small on you,” you say smiling at your shirt on him.

“You don’t think this looks nice on me?” He says innocently.

“Oh, Obi-Wan you’d be beautiful to me even if you were naked.”

4

After finishing up what Mace interrupted, you and Obi-Wan go through the motions of getting breakfast ready for the ducks: he, carrying the massive bowl out; you, carrying your cups of coffee. You sit in the lawn chairs and watch the ducks eat. The babies are peeping and nudging into Obi-Wan’s ankles, trampling all over his bare feet, desperate for attention, until he scoops them up and lets them sit on his lap.

One starts closing its eyes on and off and waggles its tail and its head slumps forward into Obi-Wan’s knee.

“This one is always sleepy and trying not to nap,” he tells you, his finger tracing a delicate line in the duckling’s pin feathers.

“You should call him FOMO,” you tell him, smiling over your cooling coffee.

“What is that?”

“Its short for ‘fear of missing out’.”

This delights Obi-Wan so much that his laughing wakes FOMO up. “Oh, yes. Well thats him, all right.”

5

After the ducks, he takes you to Joann’s Fabric and Craft Store.

“Have you ever been into one of these stores?” Obi-Wan asks after he closes the car door you open to get out of.

For the first time, you aren’t worried about what other people may think if they see you together in public. You, wearing his beloved cardigan over a borrowed white t-shirt, and he wearing your oversized flannel shirt open over his own white t-shirt. You also don’t feel any kind of shame when the back of his fingers brush against yours and you grab his hand, and he interlocks your fingers together. The only time you feel yourself burning up is with adoration when he looks down and smiles sweetly at you the entire trek through the parking lot and up to the JoAnn’s Fabrics and Crafts.

“Yes.”

“Well, for my sake, let’s pretend this is your first time at one so I can show you everything.”

“I don’t remember everything they have in here anyway.”

“Darling, how could you have a memory of a place you’ve never been to?” He lets go of your hand and you can’t stop yourself from almost pouting over its loss.

He pushes the cart and leads you inside and looks over his shoulder like an eager, but lost puppy, to make sure you’re still near him. He makes a beeline straight for the acrylic yarn section and parks the cart to the side. You watch him frown at the massive wall of items, that line in between his eyebrows etched deep. He grabs two bundles of green yarn that are very close in shades of emerald.

“Which is the closest to Slytherin?” He asks seriously, watching your face while you struggle to bite down on a laugh working to escape. “I’m making House hats that we can wear while you read the rest of the books to me.” He steps closer, like you need to examine the shades more properly.

You pluck the bundle from his left hand and he leans forward to press a quick kiss on the back of your hand before you drop the bundle into the cart. He grins at hoe flustered this open display of affection has made you, almost all of his teeth showing and this makes you take his face in your hands and to kiss him on the cheek, close to his beauty mark.

When he replaces the green he doesn’t need, you push the cart forward to the next section. He stands closely behind you, his chest pressed into your back, and his fingers curled under the cart’s handle, his hands on either of yours and presses his nose into the soft skin of your neck behind your ear.

He walks behind you awkwardly, but you don’t want him to stop and he tells you, “We need blue next.”

“Blue? Who is a Ravenclaw?”

He tilts his head and looks at the side of your face. You reach over awkwardly to push his fringe away that’s fallen into his eyes. “Grumbis.”

You stop pushing. “Okay, Grumbis is so not a Ravenclaw; he is a Gryffindor.”

He steps out from behind you to look at you fully. “Grumbis is absolutely a Ravenclaw—he is full of mystery. He literally keeps secret treasure in his mouth at all times. He loves learning—he’s always holding my books and things.”

His indignation is horribly adorable, and you reject this notion of Grumbis’s House placement for several aisles, Obi-Wan pushing the cart from behind you and murmuring furiously all the additional reasons as to why Grumbis is the “quintessential” Ravenclaw: that he would be good at trivia and sudoku; that he would be far more witty than anyone else if his zippered mouth could speak; and finally, that he would make an excellent Quidditch player. Obi-Wan is not amused when you say that Grumbis would make an excellent quaffle, with the way that he so perfectly hurls through the air when thrown into closets amidst the throes of passion.

Once all of the House color yarns are collected, you steal away to go look at calligraphy pen sets and when you find the ink refills that you need, you walk briskly between each aisle, truly believing that you have lost your professor, until you find him riffling around some miscellaneous crafting supplies near the colorful cottonballs. You toss your ink into the basket and watch him with amusement as he continues his pilfering, stopping only so briefly to push his hair from his face.

“Would you still have a crush on me if I looked like this?” He asks and whips around to face you. Two large googly eyes are pressed into his closed eyes and he’s scrunching his face to keep them in place.

“Who ever said I had a crush on you? You’re such a huge dork.”

He peels the googly eyes off his face and frowns at you with his large blue ones. “Is that what people are saying about me? That I’m a dork? A huge one?” He tosses the bag of googly eyes into the cart and follows you to the front. He tugs on your sleeve and tells you that Miss Jennifer is working the register and that he’s very excited for you to meet her.

“Miss Jennifer,” Obi-Wan says, taking all of your things out of the cart and readying them to be rung up. “This is my girlfriend.” He puts his arm around your waist, and pulls you closer to him as though trying to bring you into more of the other woman’s view. The way he calls you his girlfriend makes your heart thunder and stop so hard that you literally forget your name when trying to introduce yourself to this woman.

Miss Jennifer tells you she should have retired a long time ago, but she can’t stand being in the house all day with nothing to do so she works here part time. She is a kind older woman, and the way she smiles at Obi-Wan (and calls him Professor Ben) is like he lights up her entire world.

“You be good to this nice man,” Miss Jennifer says kindly, handing the receipt to you.

“I will,” you promise. And she can tell that you mean it.

“Don’t listen to her,” Obi-Wan says, grabbing your hand and locking your fingers like he did before you came into the store. “She’s the one that’s been going around telling everyone what a huge dork I am.”

“Oh, Benny. We all been knew.”

—


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our dear professor is disturbed by an internet phenomenon and must sneak into your room to tell you about it; fall semester begins; and you are surprised that you and your dear professor have a few friends in common.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating: Filth! Explicit! 18+! Mature! PIV sex; oral sex-male receiving; unprotected sex
> 
> A/N: We are back to them texting. Remember: bolded italics are Prof. Kenobi’s texts; plain italics are reader’s
> 
> Word Count: ~6.687 k

\--

1

**_have you ever heard of this thing_ **

**_its from the internet. this nelson mandolin thing?_ **

**_where……_ **

**_everything you remember isnt real?_ **

**_!!!!!!!!!_ **

_A- that is not what it is_

_B- it is Mandela._

**_mandela*_ **

**_it so it._ **

**_Is*_ **

_It really isn’t, Ben._

**_i*k n o w*its mandela;_ **

**_my*p h o n e*didnt know that._ **

While your phone screen bubbles and stops, bubbles and stops with his current fit, you think about how atrocious his texting is but how impeccable his punctuation always seems to be. And now, he’s sent a screen shot image—you had to show him how to do that; before screen shots, he took photos of his iPad screen with his phone’s camera and sent blurry disasters—of a Berenstain Bears book.

**_this bear family._ **

**_Yes yes what about them, dear?_ **

**_that is *~*NOT*~* how their name is spelled????_ **

**_“dear” :]_ **

_As a soon-to-be librarian, and former child, I can assure you it has always been Berenstain._

**_:[_ **

**_no._ **

**_it hasnt been!!_ **

**_-stein._ **

_I bet you never even read these books so why do you care?_

_because I know im right_

_& needa win this week_

_especially after those incorrect, blasted quiz results._

_You are—if nothing else—demonstrating the veracity of those quiz results._ But you delete this message; it has been days, and he still won’t let Attention Seeking Drama Queen go. Instead, you tell him:

_You’re being a brat, Ben. Stop it_

**_i will not._ **

_before you really start bothering yourself._

_It’s Berenstain._

**_It is not._ **

**_;.[_ **

**_not bothering myself.e_ **

**_Would you like to go to the nearest library_ **

**_or bookstore and camp out until they open in the morning to scour the titles?_ **

**_So I can show you how wrong you are?_ **

**_YEah, alot._ **

_Okay. Sure. Let’s do it. I’ll be here all night._ You roll your eyes after sending that and feel as though you know he’s rolling his, too. You tuck your phone under your pillow to let it charge for a while and change into your sleep clothes. It’s ten, you should go to sleep soon. You scroll around on your phone, hoping it will tire out your eyes out and make you doze until you fall into a deeper sleep.

It doesn’t come.

Instead, later, there is a light tapping coming from the other side of your window around midnight. Up until now, you’ve been hiding under your blankets and squinting at your phone, reading random articles instead of sleeping like you know you should be—you had to get up early to open the library in the morning. You all but rip the blanket off your head and turn on your phone’s flashlight and aim it at your window to find Obi-Wan Kenobi with his nose pressed against the glass, and his hands cupped around his eyes squinting from bind his glasses. When he sees you, he waves in a loose and embarrassing way.

You roll out of bed and open the window. “I cannot believe you.”

“You cannot believe me? You told me you’d be here all night. And here you are. And here I am.” He’s grinning with all of his teeth and presses Grumbis into your hands.

“What is this?”

“I thought we agreed on having a sleepover? So you can show me the books in the morning.”

“I was only kidding!” But you can’t stop the warm flush you feel in your chest when you watch him push his hair back with both hands and push his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

You hug Grumbis to your chest as you watch your professor’s head dip below the window sill. When he returns, he’s passing more things to you: his iPad; a bag from a gas station (“I wanted to bring snacks, I didn’t know what you’d want so I grabbed everything”—‘everything’ was correct: trail mix, Skittles, chocolate, and that really gross flavor of Pringles he loves and refuses to believe you hate, and of course Hi-Chews); a bottle of green tea, its label sweating and slick and peeling. You drop all of these treasures onto your untidy bed and stand by the window, offering you hand as he hauls himself inside. And there’s something terribly geeky and thrilling over the way that he’s sneaking into your room in the middle of the night. You’re both adults; he could have used the door—texted you to let you know he was here, and you could have walked out to let him in. But instead, he wanted to surprise you. With your favorite things: himself being the first item on that list.

Hes wearing these short running shorts (he doesn’t run) and you hope no underwear like he does with his jeans, one of his t-shirts that are too short, and his cardigan. He looks beautiful. Sleep deprived. A little deranged with that obsessive hyperfixation bleary-eyed stare when he goes down internet rabbit holes. But he looks beautiful. Soft. And he smells like fresh bedding, and ginger ale when he kisses you hello.

And then you’re both laying on your stomachs on your bed, shoulder to shoulder, with his iPad resting on Grumbis. He’s showing you reddit. You tell him to not get on reddit, that people are mean while he’s telling you how mean everyone on reddit is. He created an account just to tell people that. But the only subreddit he is involved with really is related to the Mandela Effect, and he filters by the top posts of all time, reading everything to you, asking your opinion on all of the phenomenon. He takes it very seriously, using his finger to trace the lines of the text he reads to you while you unwrap Hi-Chew after Hi-Chew for him and trace one of the latest against his lower lip until he takes it in his mouth and chews thoughtfully, pausing his reading. Until you start bickering again.

Rachel busts into your room when you both get far too loud, hand gripping your doorknob and leaning into the fram, “IT IS THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!”

Obi-Wan clambers out of your bed, “Rachel,” and all but shoves his iPad up her nose. “Which is the correct spelling of this bear family’s surname?”

Rachel softly pushes his device away and looks at him with a murder glare. “Go to sleep, Professor Kenobi.” And as she shuts your door again, “I’ve got to get up early in the morning for work. Just…keep it down? Behave yourselves.”

You both calm and quiet and get back into bed, but then… But then, he sees your record player when you’re poking around on his Animal Crossing Pocket Camp account, and he tumbles out of bed and makes himself small by the record player. You watch him sitting on one leg, his other tucked up to his chest as he delicately pilfers through your record collection. There’s a small gasp and he tugs one out and turns to you, his big blue eyes the only thing visible over the top of it: David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’.

“Oh, yeah. I’m trying to collect as much of his stuff as I can.”

“May I put it on?”

“Yes, but—”

Before you tell him to make sure it’ll be quiet before he gets it going, he’s dropping the needle on the volume, and the first song blares with the VOLUME ALL THE WAY UP. And you have to leap cat-like out of your bed, spilling Hi-Chews all over the floor, and you tackle him out of the way to get to the volume knob and turn it almost all the way down. He recovers from being pushed out of the way and is on his knees, shuffling towards you with his hair in his eyes, and he grabs you around your waist, growling playfully pulling you against him sideways into his lap. You pretend like you’re going to kiss his cheek, but softly bite at his ear and he whines, pushing his hand up the front of your shirt and tickling you. You struggle against him and pull him into the floor, and you’re both tangled up in each other “Bite me again,” he says and you do, but harder, until he shouts and your heads whip to your bedroom door and you’re both holding your breath to see if you hear Rachel and Will being disturbed by it. Its now well-past midnight and even though she should be asleep, Rachel and Will are still watching tv in the living room which is right outside your door so you have to be extra quiet.

When you and Obi-Wan look at one another again, you tell him a bit sternly, “You’re such a bad boy sometimes. Such a brat. You know this, too.” You disentangle yourself from him and you swear he pouts over this.

In the tussle you knocked his glasses off his face and when you both stand, you reach up to put his glasses on and thats when he grabs you and you dance together and leans forward and presses a question into the soft skin of your neck where it meets your shoulder. “Will you fuck me in your bedroom floor? I promise I’ll behave.” But he’s said it in his teacher voice, with his front pressed almost protectively in front of yours, looking at you with a keen and innocent interest.

You want to tell him ‘yes, of course I’ll fuck you in my bedroom floor’, but you can’t. Because the only thing you can think of is how the song on the record has changed to ‘Heroes’, and how you are in your candle-lit and messy bedroom with probably the most gorgeous man you’ll ever meet, and he’s holding you closely, slow dancing with you, his hands on your hips, fingers creeping at the hemline of your sleep shirt, and steadying you against his body, and looking at you like you are the only thing in his universe’s orbit. And he’s got his nose pressed into your forehead, breathing every word to the song out, pulling back to look at you with, “And you, you can be mean,” digging his fingers into your hips and pressing his hard cock into you, eyes dark with lust. And when he says “mean” hes scrunching his face and showing all of his teeth in his specific smile.

“I’m going to fuck you in my bedroom floor,” you manage, breathlessly, pulling him down with you, making room for him between your legs so he can hover over you.

“I just want to look at you,” he whispers, with his hair in his eyes, and you’re pushing it away with your fingers, and he’s pressing his forehead into yours and singing to you again, hips crushed into you, his clothed cock crushed into your damp sleep shorts, but stilled, and and pulling back to kiss the inside of your wrist near his face where you haven’t—and seemingly cannot—let go of his hair. “I love you.”

Your fingers fly to his cardigan and he lets you help him shrug out of it and pulls his shirt up and over his head while you tear yours off and hes pressing his chest into your breasts, and the warmth and weight of him above you is enough to make you finally relax and you think you could finally fall asleep. Until his tongue and teeth have found your bare shoulder and his fingers are sliding up the inside of your thigh and he’s whispering against your skin again, this time asking if he can take the rest of your clothes off. You push your shorts and the rest off, impatiently, and his cockhead dripping with precome drags against your inner thigh, and this jolts you awake with a carnal and crazed lust, and your fingers are pressing into his golden red chest hair, and you’re pushing him back and back until you’re straddling his lower shin. He looks at you down the length of his body and tilts his head back, digging it into the floor, his throat widely exposed and swallowing hard as you grind your wet and silken folds against his leg, lowering your face to his lap and he hisses loudly, a sharp intake of breath. Your eyes dart to the door, but the television is still on and loud enough to drown that out.

You grab his shaft with one fist, and after wetting your lips, press a lingering kiss to his weeping cockhead and pull back slowly. In the hazy candlelight on your desk, he sees a potion of your spit and his precome wind a strand from his slit to your parted lips, and his mouth slowly falls open and a cooing sound of adoration comes from him. You make eye contact before closing your eyes and returning your attentions to his swollen and needy cock, slowly pressing the tip into your mouth and his hands grip uselessly at nothing but stray, short clumps of carpet. His hips buck into you, and you steady him with one hand, withdrawing from him and murmuring, “Behave yourself,” against his velvet tip, before lavishing it with sloppy and lingering kisses as though you’re giving them to his mouth. He covers his face with both hands and you see his thighs tighten and quiver.

“I’m going to take you into my mouth,” you tell him, “inch by inch, until I can feel you in my throat. Okay?”

His feeble whine.

“What is that, angel?”

You look up at him, and he’s only nodding with his face still covered.

When you’ve worked him in as far as you can take him—a surprising amount—, you moan into him, and grind your hips helplessly against his leg. This time, you’re the one gripping at nothing at all, your own slit weeping and aching, and your stuttering fingers against his inner thigh snaps some sense into him, and he pulls his hands from his face, and says in his teaching voice,

“You like having your professor fill you wherever he can stuff his cock, isn’t that right? Do you want it, angel?”

You nod into his lap, trying to keep the wet, suckling sounds to a minimum. Hushed love, you think. Muted desire, but only in sound and not intensity. “I want it, Professor Kenobi.”

And then he adds, propping himself up on his elbows to watch you, almost like it’s an afterthought, “My little slut. So pretty, aren’t you?”

And he doesn’t even realize that he said it until you freeze on him, looking up at him the best you can from this angle. His tone shifts immediately, a litany of apologies—the cool praising gone.

But you only pull back and back and back until his cockhead tugs from behind your tight mouth with a too-loud pop, and you widen your eyes at him, trying to set him off, “I like being professor’s little slut”

He says nothing. He can’t speak.

But you can. “You won’t tell anyone that I’m Professor Kenobi’s little cocksucking slut, will you?”

His muscles give out, and his elbows stop supporting him. He can only look at you dumbly with his hair a mess.

“Will you?” You follow up, playing up that pleading look before turning your attentions back to his cock, drawing your tongue slowly at the base, and moving up towards the head with just the tip of your tongue, but not going back down on him.Still no response. You know he can’t even comprehend what just happened. And you know that all he knows is that he needs you taking him again. And you know, this is Ben, when you have him like this. Silent, but needy. Aching to cry out, or just cry period. Ben, the brat you’re working to tame as you’re aching just as deeply to work his cock back into your throat. “Will you?” You wrap her lips around the head and collecting his new batch of precome with your tongue.

“Daring, please I-”

“Promise me, Professor.” By now, you’re flickering your tongue over him now, waiting patiently. Or at least pretending to be patient.

And he can only lay his head all the way back, avoiding your gaze, staring at the ceiling, his thighs a tightened bundle of nerves and muscles. One of his arms is draped across his eyes, belly clenching.

You kiss his inner thigh before crawling up him, straddling him, dragging your soaked folds over the underside of his cock, trapping him between you and his lower belly. He tugs Grumbis from where he’d fallen into the floor earlier, and pulls a wrapped condom from his mouth. You slide back and watch him frantically tear it open with his teeth, and then push himself into his sheath, before dragging yourself over him again, pressing your forehead into his, your hands on his shoulders.

“Tell me you want it, Ben.”

“I want it, darling, please...I want it.”

“Can you tell me how badly, angel?” You start rocking your opening against the tip of his cock and you feel him absolutely quake underneath you.

“I fuck myself in my office before coming to visit you at work because all I can think about is your pussy taking me just like this.”

“You like when i have you pinned and take your cock how I want to? How I like it?” You give him delicate kisses, pulling away before he can even return one. “My tight pussy takes your fat cock so, so good. Isn't that right, Ben?”

“It is yours. Please darling; I’m yours...please. Everything is for you.”

“But you’re doing so well right now. Being so good for me. Surely you don’t need any more than this.” You still your hips, tracing a tickling, swirling pattern with your fingertips over his chest and down to his belly.

“Take all of it, please.”

“Tell me you love me.”

“I have never loved anyone the way I love you. I want to be your good boy. I’ll do anything.”

You let him kiss you, and when you pull back, you lave his throat with your tongue like you were just using it on his cock. “You have such a heavy, pretty cock.” You feel him nodding. “It deserves to be buried inside me, and be fucked until you’re writhing.” His nodding, more frantically. You line him up with yourself, and pull back to look him in the eyes so you can fully amuse yourself by echoing something he once told you. “I have loved you before, Ben. But now I shall fuck you.”

And he can hardly speak. “All yours, all for you. Please just do it. Just do it, darling,” and he’s breathless, panting, writhing beneath you. Your hands hesitant on his chest, and him begging you to use him, telling you you could literally crush him (you can’t and won’t he knows) and he would thank you.

“I’ve got you,” he tells you. “You…please do whatever you want to me. Just do it.”

“Such a sweet and pretty boy, behaving for me like this,” and one last kiss before impaling yourself on him, and his eyes shut immediately, and you swallowing the moan he breathes into your mouth.

“Look at me.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Ben.”

“You feel so good, I may cry,” he lets out a dry and nervous laugh, and you hum out a sound in response, swallowing it as quickly as it escapes your throat, and you place your fingers over his lips to quiet him, shushing him softly, and he kisses them and when you trace his lower lip with your thumb, you press into his mouth and he opens his eyes, and they look like tears are welled up, and he takes you into his mouth, softly biting down at the base of your digit and then swirling his tongue over and under.

When your eyes lock with his its like everything stills for a moment and then he grabs your wrist, ghosting it really, and removes you from his mouth and his fingers find your hips and hes fucking up into you at such an unrelenting pace that you’re knocked unsteady and grab at your hand slides up to the base of his throat and hes getting at you harder, the wet sound of his cock slamming into your arousaldeafens you, the stinging sound of skin meeting skin and hoping it leaves some kind of irritating heat from the chafed joining of hips and his strong thighs into yours, as soft as the desperate groans peeling up from under his sturdy chest.

Your loud cry when hes buried all the way is embarrassing and you feel your body flush with latent mortification, but he runs the smooth, flat of his palm up your lower back and cradles you to his chest before rolling you to your back and pushing your thighs open with his palms hovering his cockhead over your aching slit.

There is a switch: he flips you over onto your back and coos, “Ooh, look at you my precious sweet one.” And in this moment, you know to call him,

“Obi-Wan, please,” straining your neck to reach him for a kiss. He looks soft, like he will let you, but then he catches your hands and pins them on either side of your head on your mattress, his palms warm against yours and you buck your hips up into his at the contact. You die on the inside when he covers your mouth with his palm, “Be quiet, darling. Rachel told us to behave.”

The last thing you can think of before your orgasm shatters all thoughts shared between your two remaining braincells is how you never thought you would be able to ever talk to a partner during sex. That there is something about the man who wants nothing from you but your time, and nothing but your consent to love you until you’re a trembling mess in his arms, there is something about him that makes you want to be bold and ask him things like,

“Can you take the condom off? I want to feel you.”

And him, panting warm against your neck, his breath and soft and as gingery as his hair in his face, the ones on his chest, and the tuft above his cock still coated slick and darkened by your arousal.

“Are you sure, angel?”

“Obi-Wan, please.”

And he cries against your neck, whining from your words and from the loss of contact as he withdraws. The condom is gone as quickly as it was put on. He holds his breath and exhales in a silent groan as he pushes slowly into you, filling you up with a different kind of heat and you know what he meant earlier about crying. The intensity of having him as close as humanly possible is too overwhelming and too triggering for an additional orgasm. And he reads your body with the tips of his fingers and his warm palm pressing into your lower belly just above your mound and his thumb on his other hand running steady strokes over your still swollen and glistening clit, rocking into you soft, but heavy and hard and precisely. And when you come a second time he’s all flushed and shaky breathing and is obviously embarrassed when he blurts out all in a one-worded whisper, asking, “May I come inside of you?”

And you let him, and him feeling you still tightening and fluttering and clenching around him sets him off and the sounds he makes just undoes you as he loses so much of himself in you that he spill warm with love into you just like the last words he whispers into your neck.

—

After, you sneak out of your room wrapped in Obi-Wan’s cardigan and only your panties to go to the bathroom and to get washcloths to clean yourselves up with. Rachel is in the middle of turning the television in the living room off. Will must have toddled off to bed already. Rachel tosses the remote control onto the couch and after you both watch it bounce against a cushion and then settle, she looks at you with a devilish flashing of her eyes,

“Is Professor Ben still here, or were you just in there fisting yourself to David Bowie’s wailing again?

“Professor Ben?” You ask, going in the opposite direction of her “I don’t know her.”

—

You come back in with the rags and hes standing with his backside facing you one hand on his hip and the other with his fingers in his stubble and examining your bookshelf in the low candle light with his head cocked to the side thoughtfully. You shut and lock your door behind you. You walk up to him and press the damp rag into his lower back and he jolts turning around. “Look at you,” he says, grabbing you by your waist and pulling you close to his front, damp and clammy. You drape one of the rags over his shoulder and press your forehead into his chest and work on his cock, now soft, but still heavy in your hand, and you work on cleaning him and he pressed his nose into your hair, breathing, “I love you,” into the dampness. “My little one, my darling one.”

—

Much of the summer is spent the same. You work. He teaches his summer classes. He takes you to his cabin. You take him in your room. You both spend the summer stuck somewhere between the things you can never seem to get enough of, and the things you only want to slow and stop. Like time passing all around you: a cruel joke that it plays, even when it feels like you could be stuck in these small moments together forever and never have to worry about the morning creeping over you.

—

2

The fall semester starts wildly, like it always does. And you dig deep for your best customer service expression and tone of voice (not at all like your real one; you have no idea where it came from), like you always do. It’s ironic that the change in behavior and demeanor is the easiest its ever been, now that this is your last semester working for the library. You know you will miss it; it’s the only job you’ve had since you’ve been on your own. But ever since you finished your Masters Degree in Library Sciences last fall, you were ready to be finished with it so that you could move to the next step which was a paid internship next semester with the elementary school across the street. You had several hours left needing to be filled for your licensure, and once they were complete in the spring, you’d be qualified to apply for full-time librarian positions at schools. The internship would consist of much of what you already do here, alongside going into all the different classrooms and teaching literacy skills and also digital literacy skills.

But until then. Fall semester. And this first week to get through: lost students looking for buildings and classrooms; faculty who have managed to lock themselves out of their email accounts over summer break, despite vehement claims that they ‘didn’t even mess with the damn thing since last semester’;

Fall semester is always the worst because that’s when patrons are the rudest and most harried. And Obi-Wan gas been feeling the stress, too. It turns out he was a bit reprimanded by his department chair for missing that meeting the Monday that you both lost track of time. To cope, he’d developed a fun thing for the two of you to do to break up the doldrums of these slow first days, which was taking personality quizzes on sites like buzzfeed or other random ones that you were surprised he could even remember the names of. He would send you the link and you’d take the quiz during a coffee run or while hiding in the back office on your break; he would take his in between lectures, and then you would both screen shot your results and send them to one another. Obi-Wan kept a meticulous excel file that tracked your responses and coded whether you each believed it was astute or not with a + - or o, based on accurate, not accurate, and maybe accurate respectively. The sheet was color coded “to make it pretty”—you thought it made it more confusing.

But all in all you were surprised how he was able to figure out how to create a google document and how to let you share editing access to it without him having to ask you to help him set it up. You figured he was probably still mortified from the time that you didn’t react very professionally over him asking you to help him save something as a pdf and rotate it. Hed even come to you as a patron, leaning forward on the front desk with his hair in his eyes watching you poke around on his laptop until you did it. He watched none of this and took no notes. People in the line were irate.

“I was going to return this,” he says digging through his shoulder bag before producing a really old copy of _The Awakening_ , “but since you’re over here shaming those of us who are not digitally literate, i shall not return it.”

“You need to give me that book.”

“I will not,” he says tucking it back into his bag.

“Its isn’t yours to keep.”

“And it isn’t yours either,”.

“You really need to return it, Professor Kenobi. Give it to me. Now.”

He only arches an eyebrow. “I’d be all too glad to give it to you later. But, I believe someone here has given me illegal borrowing privileges, and so I’m allowed to do whatever I want, I’m afraid.”

“It is the first week back and you really want to do this.”

“Yeah, a lot.”

“Come on, Dr. Kenobi, wrap it up.”

“Excuse me, Dr. Mundi, but I’m having a discourse with the librarian.”

“Hurry it up; we all have classes soon and you’re going to make us late.”

“My apologies that you didn’t get in line sooner.”

Dr. Mundi turns a furious shade of red but says nothing. Instead, he tugs at his facial hair and glares a hole into the back of Professor Kenobi’s unkempt head of hair. Someone further in the back of the line, “Hurry it up, Kenobi!”

He takes a sip out if the coffee cup in his hand. “Ooh yes. Quite bitter. Just like all of you this fine morning,” he hands you the paper cup. “Throw this away for me?”

But its still full and heavy in your hand and you know that he’s gotten the drink for you, but wants to be careful and discrete in front of the crowd so he’s asking you to get rid of it for him.

And then, under his breath while he gingerly pries his laptop from your fingers, “See you at three?”

“Probably not—I’ll have you barred from the building by then.”

He slaps his Post-It note in front of you, “Please let me know when this is available,” sticking it to the front desk and you swipe it, stuffing it in your pocket without looking at it, and then the next patron after Dr. Mundi starts yelling at you about their expired password and how they had no warning at all that it was going to happen. You dont tell them that you perform IT services, and that multiple email reminders go out that alert you to change the password. Instead, you smile, take their Chromebook, and say, “Not to worry; let’s fix that right away.”

Later, reading Professor Kenobi’s note in the bathroom, expecting it to be a list od books for you to check out under your account for him. Instead, “try not to let them get to you today. i look forward to seeing you later. you lift up my days, and light up my nights. all the time.”

You’re smiling far too obviously by the time you get back to the front desk and see your co-worker—now just a student worker to you since you’d graduated—and they take one AirPod out to ask, “Is Professor Kenobi railing you? I passed him on the way in and Dr. Mundi was telling him off for flirting with you in line.”

“This is the second or third time you’ve asked me something incredibly personal about him. We are friends.”

“Yeah but why?”

Why, indeed. You think of your earlier bickering. And it was just. _Fun?_ Ridiculous? Childish? Sure. But. Taking the quiz with him while on your lunch break. The two of you tucked away in a remote corner of the library.

—

Outside, a miserable and humid downpour. Some hail: a nervous barrage against the wide window to your left. Inside, a single study cubicle desk: your chairs crammed next to one another; your leg over his; his fingers tracing circles on your thigh and his coffee cup resting on your knee while you fill out the ‘Which Type of Royalty Are You’ quiz for the both of you. First, yours and he reaches forward, screen-shorting the results:

And you get Boss Bitch Queen and it says: _Bitch you work it and everybody knows! You are doin’ you and the effort you put in everyday is such a positive influence on everyone around you! Your royal motto: Let’s get this bread!_

Then, you filling out his quiz. You, reading all of the questions. Obi-Wan, pressing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and squinting at the text on the screen. He thinks of each silly question with a level of severity you’ve only witnessed when he reads to you at night. Questions like: ‘Which bread could you live without?’; ‘Pick a purple item’; ‘Pick a random bee butt sticking out of a flower’ (he changes his answer three times for this one).

And Obi-Wan gets: Attention-Seeking Drama Queen and it says: _Oooh, sis: you know_ ** _everybody’s_** _deepest darkest secrets and you aren’t ashamed to let everyone know it! Your favorite meal of the day is tea time, especially when you are starving for attention. Your royal motto: I promise I wont tell a soul! (That sounds fake, but okay)._

“We are _not_ adding these results to the list.”

“Oh, no. No way— _you’ve_ added ones I didn’t agree with these past few days!” You poke over to the Google document tab on his iPad and scroll to the row with the appropriate quiz title.

He grabs your wrists and draws your hand to his mouth for a kiss. “No, this is different.” He slides his iPad away from you.

“Ben. Stop.”

But he can’t let it go. He takes the quiz again, with different answers: he gets the same results. He puts in your answers, and still gets his original result. He asks you to fill it out with his original answers, and you get ‘Big Dick Energy King.’ And you both look at each other over the big dick part and you laugh, sipping from his coffee.

“Well,” you finally say as he gently pries the cup from you for a sip. “They got that part right. Just for the wrong member to our party…right, professor?”

Obi-Wan all but chokes on his sip, and he starts pressing his palm into his pants and murmurs, “Stop it.”

—

Later, when he’s in a lecture, you log into the document and add his results with a ‘o.’ But then, almost soon after that, you are kicked out of the document and find that you can’t log back in. So you tell your desk mate that you’re going to have a quick break, and you FaceTime Professor Kenobi from near the restrooms.

He answers as he’s stepping out of class, and you hear him tell them all, “Family emergency; I’ll be right back.”

You, before he has a chance to say hello, “DID YOU REVOKE MY PRIVILEGES TO THE SPREADSHEET?!”

Him, in his teacher voice, “You have demonstrated your inability to handle the responsibility that comes with respecting the spreadsheet.”

“IT IS FOR BUZZFEED QUIZES, BEN.”

“I literally do none of the things that quiz said!”

In your head, a montage of every time he has ever done precisely this. All the phone calls of a colleague or friend calling, him pulling you close so you can listen in on the call with him, his eyes wide and mouthing ‘i told you’ over whoever the hell was on the other line admitting to Obi-Wan that they were still having personal troubles because they didn’t listen to his advice. You never understood what was going on. Ever. But he was always so excited to share gossip with you, often FaceTiming you, breathless to tell you.

—

3

When the first week of classes is almost over on a Friday afternoon, Obi-Wan comes to get you and tells you that he’s taking you out for a spot of lunch from a food truck. Said truck turns out to be an ice cream truck that stops somewhere between the university and the elementary school across the street. This is the very same elementary school that you will spend the rest of your licensure hours at next semester, and have spent many hours at in previous semesters where the teachers told their students you were their ‘special visitor’ send from the ’big school across the street’ to give them story time. The children struggled with your name, like they do with many, and simply referred to you as ‘Miss Bari’—the closest they could get to ‘Miss Librarian’.

By the time you and Obi-Wan safely cross the street, there is a shrieking chorus of many four- and five-year-olds from one of the Pre-K classes screech out a litany of, “FESSER NOBI!”

Obi-Wan grabs your hand and looks at you proudly, “They can’t say Professor Kenobi.”

One of the little boys runs up directly to him and hugs his leg like a small koala bear. Obi-Wan reaches down and picks him up and the boy throws his arms around his neck.

“Hi, Fesser Nobi.”

“Hello, Mr. Anakin.”

Apparently, it was a long-standing tradition that Obi-Wan broke away from campus to grab a treat with the children when he didn’t have classes. All the Pre-K children would gather around the truck, climbing all over their parents or holding their teachers’ hands, waiting impatiently for their after school treats. And apparently, Professor Kenobi, too, was a special visitor who came to the classroom from time to time to teach them how to play small instruments like maracas. He would bring his guitar and sing them songs about sharing, and being nice, and telling a trusted adult if anyone ever does anything mean to them. And _apparently,_ Professor Kenobi knew all of the children’s names and called them Mr./Miss whatever-their-first-name-is, and knows all of their ice cream orders.

More children run over to Professor Kenobi, the ice cream truck long forgotten, almost tripping over their tiny tater tot feet and trampling over one another. And they screech over him and love him and beg to be picked up by him, more clinging koalas on his legs.

Once Anakin has tired out chattering loudly and directly into Obi-Wan’s ear about his latest Lego project, he turns his attentions to you and his eyes grow wide and shining, and gasps, “MISS BARI?!” which earns you your own chorus of screeches from the children. And a barrage of questions from them to Obi-Wan, “FESSER NOBI IS THAT YOUR WIFE?’” “FESSER NOBI ARE YOU IN LOVEEEEEEEEE?!?!”.

Obi-Wan doesn’t answer their questions, but the children watch him kiss your cheek and they go absolutely BANANAS.

“My request for sabbatical next semester went through. I’ll be performing music therapy community service for the children in the spring.”

—


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rachel breaks some news to Reader; our dear professor sees a platypus at the zoo, and suffers a massive executive malfunction because his brain can't handle the cuteness; it is an unpleasant person’s birthday that teaches us new things about Obi-Wan; Reader and our dear professor grow closer; and Mace Windu must call a meeting with the two of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings/Trigger Warnings: 18+! Mature! Slight!Smut! angst, drama, mentions of past sexual assault in section 7, toxic masculinity in section 4, mentions of mental health issues/anxiety/depression in section 2, unprotected sex, mentions of cyberbullying in section 7
> 
> Special Thanks: I couldn’t have written this update without the Three Musketeers workshopping some scenes with me and I am especially grateful to Mia who helped me figure out the ‘Fett Sextet’.

\--

1

The weekend brings you into Rachel’s room and she’s telling you something disarming and alarming, but you’re trying your hardest to be a good friend. You’re both sitting on her bed and soft music is playing in the background from a laptop she’s dropped on the hardwood floors one too many times. Sometimes the screen didn’t work and though its been like this for semesters, it’s still been a viable excuse for her to neglect her schoolwork and blame it on the battered Macbook.

“I won’t renew the lease to the house this spring,” she tells you, picking at her fitted sheet, but not breaking eye contact with you. And that’s something that you always respected and appreciated about her—just how she could BE. Unapologetic, but not cruel. Honest and straight to the point, even when you wanted to be mollycoddled. “Will found this new apartment across town and I’ll be moving in with him. Alicia is moving in with Tyler. Like, good luck am I right?”

You lean back into her pillows and stretch your legs out over her lap and she starts picking at the lint on your leggings while you agree, “Yeah, totally.”

“I just wanted to give you a heads up because I didn’t want you to feel like I was leaving you high and dry.” She pulls a long hair off your shin and she laughs at it, claims its hers before going on. “Like this way you can start saving and stuff? I dont know. I want to say sorry.”

“But you shouldn't apologize at all. We all knew going into this that we’d all go our separate ways after graduation.”

She gives up on your leggings and rests against her pillows next to you, shoulder to shoulder like you always to when you’re having a hear tot heart. “Exactly.”

A beat and then she asks what you knew she was probably dying to ask, her face whipping to the side to look at you. “What will you do? Move in with Professor Ben?”

You purse your lips to keep yourself from barking laughter. “No!”

“I bet if you asked, he’d let you.” She wriggles her shoulder against yours. The motion causes her laptop to fall violently off the bed. Neither of you care.

“I dont think we are like that.”

“I think he has been ‘like that’ over you since day one.”

—

And so, in the evenings and on the weekends you start looking around for a new place to live. Not to move yet but to have an idea about budgeting and an idea of which part of town you’d like to live in. Obi-Wan goes with you because, in his words,

“I hate to be sexist. But a lot of people are sexist and creepy and I dont want you going to any showings alone”.And he protects you from gross landlords and from gross residents you could be potential neighbors with.

And he finds something wrong with all of the fucking places you go to.

“This one didn't have a sink,” he says gruffly when he’s unlocking his car and opening the door for you on the passenger side.

You wait until he’s joined you inside before you give him a frazzled look. “What?! Of course it did.”

“Did you look?” He glances at you with a raised eyebrow and starts the car.

“No.” You start the music.

“Well, there. You didn’t see because it wasn’t there.” He wraps his arm around the back of your seat as he backs out, pressing a quick kiss into your hair before he looks over his shoulder and out the back window. His palm is steering the wheel rather than gripping it with his fingers wrapped around it, and for some reason you found that so incredibly cool dn attractive and you were sure you’d never not find it to be so.

“I didn’t even look!”

“Ah, yes. That was your subconscious protecting you from the truth, my dear.”

2

The email from Miss Secura—the pre-k teacher at the elementary school across the street from campus who allowed you and Obi-Wan to be ‘special guests’ in her classroom in the past—comes early enough in the day that no matter what else happened during your shift, you are able to think back on it and smile. She told you that the class would go on a field trip at the end of the week, and all of the children were throwing fits related to if you and Obi-Wan, aka Miss Bari and Fesser Nobi, would be chaperoning since no parents or guardians were available to. She told you int he email that the children would like if very much if _both of yo_ u could join them. If not both then **_please, please_** one of you. Obi-Wan responded to the email almost immediately, but only to you.

_“Can you please get off work this day? I really want to go. The polar bear just had all her babies and it would be lovely to go see them with the children. I know Anakin and Cody would love them especially.”_

You can’t get over how his email writing differed so much from his texting that it almost felt like you were talking to a different person entirely.

You tell your coworker that you need to go grab a coffee and they smirk playfully at you, “Professor Kenobi not here today to bring you one?”

You don’t get a coffee—instead, you get a soy chai latte for Obi-Wan, to surprise him—and stare at the faculty directory list that hangs in a heavy picture frame in the atrium of the Music School’s building until you see his name close to the bottom, and look for the suite his office is housed in. When you find it, you’re out of breath from all but flying up the steps to the third floor, and your lungs singe with the smell of burnt cheese and bread from the bagel shop on the ground floor.

The suite is empty, and all of the other office doors are shut up tight like none of the professors are there. But there is one open door, and the sounds of Megan Thee Stallion’s latest and greatest ‘WAP’ is playing softly from just beyond the threshold. You poke your head in at the same time that he looks up from his laptop covered in Black Lives Matter, Sylvia Rivera, Power to the People, Prince, and Golden Girls stickers.

“I thought I heard someone lurking.”

“I got you this,” you thrust the paper cup at him. “I thought you maybe needed to know someone was thinking about you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, our Attention Seeking Drama Queen.”

He holds the cup in both hands like it is a small and delicate thing and sips thoughtfully while he watches you admire his office. Without the acoustic guitar on its stand and the banjo on its stand, you wouldn’t know you were in a music professor’s space. Bookshelves lined all the walls filled with tomes on theory; fiction; children’s literature; hospice and end of life care. Succulents in hand painted pots lined the spaces in between, as well as pools of yarn and crocheting needles. Stacks of papers cover every surface, and heaps of throw blankets and pillows were piled onto the loveseat that his bag topped, spilling candy and more papers out of its unzipped brim. Framed movie posters and photographs of real people lined the walls: Whitney Houston, David Lynch, Gloria Anzaldúa, Michelle Obama, David Bowie, Jorge Luis Borges, Walt Whitman, and finally the piece de resistance: Lizzo. You see this last and he tells you,

“I love her. She awakened the goddess that lives inside of me.”

“That is beautiful.”

“Yeah, she is.”

You move a stack of manilla folders off the chair in front of his desk to the floor and sit down. “I’ll take Friday off so we can go see the bears with the kiddos.”

“I’m looking forward to it. I know I’ll get lots of attention that day, but I would absolutely perish without yours.”

He sends a reply email to Miss Secura and tells her that you both are available. She sends back two words:

**_Thank. God._ **

—

3

The bus ride to the zoo and the Fett boys are tousling in the back so Obi-Wan has to sit near them and Cody gives him an apologetic look that only a world weary old man can muster “I apologize for my brothers acting like a bunch of ruffians, sir.”

The Fett Sextet was the eponymous nickname for the infamous sextuplets borne of Jango Fett. In birthing order, they went by the names of: Cody, Rex, Echo, Jesse, Fives, and Waxer. They were notorious at the school as tiny troublemakers kept in line by the ‘eldest’ of them: a very tired and very mature Cody. They had an older brother in the fifth grade who went by Boba, and was known as a bully wrangler. He did not let any kid push another one around. Especially his little brothers.

Their father, Jango Fett, was one of the town’s heartthrobs, and any time there was a parent and guardian/teacher night, many flocked to the school in hopes of catching a glimpse of Jango and his strong, stern jaw and beautiful dark eyes and soft, short curls. Obi-Wan harbored a crush on Mr. Fett for a very long time, and to Cody’s great dismay, went on a couple of dates with his father: it was no secret that Cody himself harbored an innocent crush on Obi-Wan. It had inspired Obi-Wan to write a specific song for one of his special visits to the class about how everyone has the freedom to love who they love and shouldn’t be ashamed of it (this coming after Cody asked if it was okay for boys to like other boys); the song included a well-informed snippet about how children and adults cannot love one another unless they are family, and to always be sure to tell a trusted adult if another adult told them they liked them as more than a friend.

Obi-Wan calms the children by asking if they want to sing songs on the way to the zoo, and the answer is a screeching and resounding yes. But they want him to sing ‘the spaceman song’, which was Obi-Wan’s simplified and kid-friendly mash up of ‘Rocketman’ and ‘Space Oddity’. The children wait with bated breath for Obi-Wan’s particular strumming pattern to do all the claps like in ‘Space Oddity’. The remaining songs were his originals: be nice; share; behave; don’t talk to stranger; stay close to a teacher and trusted adult; be patient in line; be nice to the animals.

Miss Secura manages to get the children inside the zoo’s gate and Obi-Wan runs defense to ensure nobody tries to run ahead of the group once they’re inside. He only has to catch two around the waist and drag back and its not surprising that its two of the six Feet boys. The first born of the sextet, Cody, runs up to the middle born of the six with his hands on his hips and jaw set stern, looking so much like the commander of an army.

“Jesse! Fives! Get back in line.”

“Yes, brother,” Jesse says.

“—brother,” Fives trails in speech and on his feet, following Jesse.

Cody turns to face Obi-Wan with a level of authority all of his own. “I’m sorry, sir—they run away a lot.”

“It’s quite all right, Cody—thank you ever so much for your help. It’s very brave how you look out for your brothers. And please do not call me sir. There’s no need.” The being called ‘sir’ happened after Obi-Wan went on a couple of dates with the boys’ father.

“Yes, Fesser Nobi.”

“Now go wait with your brothers while we wait on the rest of our friends to join us.”

“I can’t believe the lot of you,” Cody says, embarrassed but still stern. “You embarrassed me in front of Fesser Nobi.”

“No longer sir, eh?” Rex says cheekily, tickling the bottom of Cody’s chin. Cody shrugs away from the contact, but grinning nonetheless.

You’re holding the clipboard and marking checks next to the names of all the children you see join the small swarm of them around you, chattering incessantly about wanting to feed the goats and swim with the alligators.

“I’m beginning to think Miss Secura has invited us along to wrangle these Fett boys. I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Obi-Wan mutters from behind you, his hand ghosting over your shoulder. You lean back into him and he presses a kiss into your temple.

“It’ll be great,” you tell him, starry eyed at how adorable he looks in the safari hat he’s donned for the occasion.

Miss Secura announces that the Buddy System will be in place once the children are on teams. “You will be on Team Bari,” she says, touching your shoulder and the children cheer, “and Team Nobi,” she tugs at the brim of Obi-Wan’s hat and the children go bananas. And all the children fly to who they want to stick with for the afternoon, clinging to legs and tugging on shirt hems. The Teams are for accountability purposes: Miss Secura will keep an overall watch on everyone; you and Obi-Wan are responsible for keeping track of your teams. The split is pretty even. Until Anakin Skywalker is moved to tears because he doesn’t want to pick just one.

“I want Miss Bari _and_ Fesser Nobi,” he wipes at his eyes with the back of his hands and the children look on quietly and patiently, waiting for their friend to be okay again.

Obi-Wan kneels beside Anakin. “Mr. Skywalker, it is so kind of you to not want to choose. But it won’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Right?” He looks over at you and you nod vigorously.

Anakin looks at you with his big, wet eyes, “You promise, Miss Bari?”

“I promise, Ani.”

Anakin sniffles once more and then holds his arms up and outstretched for Obi-Wan. Anakin settles himself on Obi-Wan’s shoulders in a piggy-back ride and wraps his arms around the older man’s neck. Obi-Wan tips his hat off so Anakin can wear it and be the brave explorer of the bunch; it sits at a jaunty angle on the back of his head so his eyes aren’t covered by the khaki fabric.

—

"They're real?" He asks quietly, eyes wide and boring into the glass. The platypus catches his gaze and swims up to him. They stare at one another. Obi-Wan flaps his hand in excitement, motioning for you to _come and see._ “She’s looking at me, she’s looking at me. Look.”

"What? Have you never seen a platypus before?"

"On Phineas and Ferb, yes of course." He presses his palms and nose into the glass. "She looks like a duck and an otter; I love her."

And then, the voice of a nearby attendant, geared towards Professor Kenobi. "Sir, please step away from the enclosure--you need to observe the animals from the other side of the rope."

“She’s trying to tell me something, mister. I think it’s ‘mind your own business’.”

—

Everyone but the bus driver naps on the ride back to the school.

4

On Saturday, after you’ve both slept in a bit and recovered from the field trip (and after you give the ducks their breakfast), Obi-Wan takes you to the old folks home to see his grandfather (his slight Scottish lilt coming out of his accent when he calls him “gran’da Ty”)because it is his birthday. He tells you while feeding the ducks how his grandfather has been a source of anxiety all his life because he can be cruel. He tells you he’s gone to therapy to learn how to deal with the taxing mental and emotional load that comes from trying to be a good grandson and caring for his grandfather like he knows his father would want him to. He even tells you he had to go on medication for his anxiety and depression for a time.

“But I’m working through it all,” he tells you. “I’m not ashamed of it—nobody should be—I’m always trying to be better.”

—

In his car before going inside to see his grandfather, he tells you, “I look at videos of my da’ before going to see gran’da’. To make me feel brave. And to make me feel good in case gran’da’ is mean.”

“Is he usually mean?”

“Oh , yes. Very much.” The tip of his tongue dart across his lower lip before he worries at it with his teeth. You grab his face with both hands and press into him for a kiss, soothing where he’s bit himself.

“I love you. You will be okay. You can get through this.”

The video is on his phone. It’s similar to the one that he emailed you ages ago: the one where Qui-Gon was helping Obi-Wan prepare for his dissertation defense. Obi-Wan is a little bit older in this video with longer hair and attempting to grow facial hair; Qui-Gon looks grayer, more frail.

“You’ll have a family one day, Obi-Wan. Just not in the way you expect.” Qui-Gon is standing at the sink with his back to the camera—Obi-Wan must have been filming. His father is dumping peas into the large colander and your heart melts to know that feeding the ducks has gone on for so long. You wonder how many generations of back yard ducks always got their breakfast from the reliable Kenobi men.

“I don’t think I’ll ever have time for one,” Obi-Wan says from behind the camera. “I’ll be too old when I get out of school, and I’ll be too busy as a junior faculty member.”

“I think you’ll meet somebody when you’re supposed to.” Sink water running and rinsing over the peas. “And by then, no matter what’s going on in your life, you’ll have all the time in the world for them. They won’t be a bother. Never a bother at all.”

“Tell that to my nine o’clock bedtime.”

“You’re going to meet someone who you’d drive across town for in the middle of the night just to see if you can make them smile; I promise you, my beautiful son. Magic is real. Not tricks, but a feeling.”

—

Everyone at the assisted living home adores Obi-Wan and they call him little Obi.

“Hi Miss Patricia, this is my sweetie,” he pulls you in front of him to see her properly, and she looks up at you with a small clap of her hands.

“Oh my, my look at you, honey. Its so nice of you to finally come see us. Little Obi has told us all about you. Graduating with honors and waiting to go work with the children. Just lovely.”

“Thank you, its really nice to meet you!” You dont know what else to say. You remember seeing on his CV how he would volunteer his time, providing music therapy to those who live here but you had no idea he still did it, nor told them about you like he did with Miss Jennifer at the fabric and craft store.

“Obi, will you sing us a song?”

“I’d love to Miss Patricia, but Im here to see gran’da’.”

“Oh, dear. Yes, he’s been quite antisocial lately. He bit one of the male nurses. Poor Danny; he couldn’t get him to go to sleep the other night.”

“Goodness,” you say softly.

Miss Patricia grabs your hand with her tissue-paper thin ones and pats you reassuringly. “Danny is just fine. Old Ty doesn’t give a shit about anyone who cares for him, pardon my language. But its true. The way he doesn't adore his own grandson like the rest of us is unthinkable. We wish our own grandsons would come visit us as much as little Obi does.”

“Thank you, Miss Patricia.” He leans down and presses a soft kiss at her temple. “I’ll come back and sing to you soon, I promise.”

“The way he sings that Elton John piece,” she tells you with bright eyes, her laugh lines etched deep into her soul, “just makes me so happy; I feel like Im the only girl in the whole, wide world.”

—

Obi-Wan’s grandfather is in his bed, legs covered with a quilt and scowls when the orderly opens the door to let you both in.

“Obi-Wan.” His deep voice says, his gaze unshifting from the television turned on, but muted.

“Happy Birthday, gran’da’,” Obi-Wan says, rifling through his shoulder bag to pull out a sealed birthday card. He moves closer to the bed and extends it in offering, a bright smile on his face. But not the kind that shows all of his teeth.

“Did you pay my fees for the month?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. It is as expected.”

“Gran’da’,” he says, turning back to you and holding his hand out so he can lock his fingers in between yours. He holds onto you tightly. Tighter than ever before. Nerves. His hand, damp. Your thumb running soft, reassuring circles. “This is my girlfriend.”

“Finally able to man up and seal the deal, huh?”

“Obi-Wan,” you say quietly, running your free hand down the side of his arm. Of course he’s wearing his father’s cardigan even though its sweltering in here. “Let’s go. He doesn’t want company.”

“That’s a smart little bitch you’ve caught there, grandson. You better listen to her.”

Obi-Wan only bites his lip and flings the card across the room and allows you to lead him out the other side.

He doesn’t sing for Miss Patricia and the rest, even though there’s time.

He doesn’t sing in the car on the way home, even though its Lizzo playing.

—

5

Days later, you’re in bed together and he’s got his papers spread all over the fitted sheet. He’s sitting cross-legged in his socks and underwear without a shirt on, following along with the grading rubric for each paper and a calculator (covered in pokemon from the first generation), calculating the rubric scores and weights very carefully, and leaving sloppy but thoughtful notes in the margins of his students’ work.

“Think of how flustered they would be if they knew you did their grading in bed.”

He whips his head up to give you an exasperated look over his glasses before pushing them up the bridge of his nose, a faint smirk playing at his mouth and threatening to show all of the mirthful lines around his eyes. “Stop it.”

“I will not.”

“They would probably be mortified,” he says, tearing into a new Hi-Chew with his teeth.

You mindlessly hold your palm out to receive the wrapping from him and then pitch it into the wastebasket next to the bed.

“No, I think they’d have a fit. Surely you see how everyone looks at you.”

“I used to. But now I only pay attention to how you look at me.”

“If you were my professor, I’d be hopelessly in love with you, and I would literally die on the inside if I knew this was where my assignments ended up.”

“Luckily for us both, you aren’t my student and I don’t have to worry about your perishing. And besides, I shall always be your professor. You know this, darling.” He touches the tip of your nose with his pointer finger and wiggles it softly from side to side.

You go back to reading out loud for him: Walt Whitman’s poetry this time: a break from prose and novels and especially Harry Potter—Obi-Wan had been emotionally destroyed over the outcome of book five , and needed a break from it. You thought it was sweet. He actually cried, clutching onto the Marauder’s Map throw blanket he made and that you both cuddle in whenever you read the Potter books to him.

“What is it?” He asks, keeping his finger pressed into his own bag to keep his place on the grading when you don’t continue with the poem.

“I don’t know how to describe it.”

He shuffles everything into a neat stack and taps your bare knee, silently asking you to face him. Your sitting mirrors his: like you’re about to start meditating while facing one another. “Try.”

So you do. “I don’t understand…why me?”

“Why you? What? Has something happened?”

“Yes. This. Whatever this is.”

“What? That we’re sweethearts?”

This, of course, causes an explosion of warmth to coat your chest. “Yes, that.”

“Because you don’t play games like the rest of them. I know people notice me. And I know I’ve become a game to a lot of them. I know some of the women faculty who have made it a sport of “trying to bed Ben”. You actually like letting me blather on at you. And you let me crawl into your bedroom in the middle of the night over stupid things. And I think you’ve got a bit of that magic da’ told me about.”

You really don’t know what to say. Your palms are damp around the book in your hand. He simply cocks his head at you and smiles before going back to grading like he didn’t just say what he said.

You read aloud for a bit, not really letting the words sink in, and are glad when he interrupts you, asking for you to go into Grumbis’s mouth for another Hi-Chew to give him.

When you unzip Grumbis’s mouth, the insides are filled with nothing but empty wrappers. You dig them out and throw them away in the waste basket by your side of the bed. You keep digging until your fingertips press into something cold and hard and flat. You grab it and yank it out. It’s a silver key on a Hufflepuff keychain.

He looks at you nervously, his hands folding in on themselves in his lap. “I thought you could come and go as you please for a little while, to see if you like staying with me.Grumbis would love it if you stayed, of course. And so would I. I’ve made space for you. I’ll always have space for you.”

—

6

Weeks ago, you and Obi-Wan started taking your lunch breaks off campus. They were on Wednesdays: the day you had a half day of work and didn't have to return after lunch and the day that he only had morning classes. These lunches morphed into afternoon naps. At some point, he conditioned himself to be full on brat by the time he waited for you to clock out of work that he would lean forward and press his forehead into your shoulder and make a muffled declare, “Want nap.” Which meant undressing each other carefully in his room and falling asleep together like that. Which almost always led to you touching one another as you both came back to the waking world. Obi-Wan almost always woke up hard; there were a few times he had a sleeping emission when he spooned you from behind, his hard cock pressed snugly and warmly between both your bodies. And showering in the dark together with only his cellphone light on when you need to clean up, soaping his chest up with his rose jam from lush and him fucking into your hand wrapped around him, his wet forehead and hair pressed into the crook of your neck, choked sobs bouncing off the linoleum: his soft, sweet cries leaving a delicate ache in your chest.

7

In September, Obi-Wan has a new internet obsession and one night, he climbs in through your bedroom window with Grumbis and a bag of snacks and crawls into bed with you. Once you’re situated around one another, like you do for napping, he shows you the website he found that allows students to leave comments about their professors. And though there aren’t many on his page, he still waited to read all of them so he could read them out loud to you moving from the oldest to the newest.

—

**_Kaitlyn R._ **

**_Fall 2013_ **

_“Professor Kenobi talks about complicated subjects, but he’s very easy on the eyes so it makes showing up to class worth it.”_

—

**_Nick P._ **

**_Fall 2013_ **

_“Bring Back the Beard 2k13!”_

—

**_Austin G._ **

**_Spring 2014_ **

_“Dr. Kenobi is a pedantic loser, only interested in his little fan club who eats up his every (mostly biased and ill-informed!) word. Yes, he can sing and play the piano and other instruments, big whoop. Hello! It is the MUSIC SCHOOL. He is nothing special, and it makes no sense how he is: 1.) the department chairperson, and 2.) how his classes are always waitlisted and then ultimately filled by his giggling fan girls who treat him like a one-man Beatles Reunion. If you don’t laugh at his obnoxious jokes, you fail. If you don’t regurgitate his very biased and liberal agenda, you fail. Don’t take this class if you are expecting a magnificent lecturer like Dr. Windu. THAT guy knows how to deliver a lecture. P.S. If you’re reading this ‘Dr.’ Kenobi, shaving off your beard was a bad move: it makes you look as childish as you actually are, especially with your stupid ‘Professor Ben’ nickname. Grow up.”_

—

**_Maria Z._ **

**_Fall 2016_ **

_“Professor Ben will make you feel valued not just as a student but as a person.”_

—

**_Russ H._ **

**_Spring 2019_ **

_“Liberal panderer.”_

—

**_Tyler A._ **

**_Spring 2020_ **

_“Dr.Kenobi abuses his institutional power to sleep with students. I personally know one student from the graduate school he has had inappropriate relations with since before she actually graduated from the university. I am available to contact if more information is needed.”_

—

**_Erica G._ **

**_Spring 2020_ **

_“More like Professor Keno-BABE!”_

—

You both can’t even laugh at that last one because of the one before it. Obi-Wan points at the name. “Alicia’s Tyler?”

“Yes.”

“A?”

“Arcade.”

“I see.” He frowns and pushes his iPad away.

“I’m so sorry, Obi-Wan. I’m so sorry. I never thought it’d get to this point. And now I’ve ruined your life, your career.”

He shifts in bed and the sheet falls around his waist, as the muscles in his bicep flex to meet you where you are and pull you into his bare chest and hold you there, shushing you, calming you. Steadying you.

“You haven’t done a thing to me. Except make me the happiest man alive, I believe.”

“But what he said—”

“Is now between he and I. I won’t let this affect you. You’ve done nothing wrong, little one.”

You unfurl yourself from him and try to stop the heaving in your chest. “I never wanted to tell you before because I thought it was over with. But years ago, back when I was still seeing him, we’d gone to this party. And we’d all been drinking. And he—”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I reported it, and he was actually suspended. I couldn’t believe the school did anything at all.”

“Sadly, they don’t a lot of times.”

“And it’s just been this constant needling ever since. Random cyberbullying from his friends—that’s why I’m not on social media.”

“I can’t believe someone who considers themselves a friend of yours is dating this person.”

“I don’t think we were ever friends. I think she kind of likes bringing him around me.”

“Childish. And also sad.”

8

But in the morning, you are copied on an email from Mace Windu sent to Obi-Wan: it’s an invitation to meet.

And when you get there, Obi-Wan is sitting politely in one of the uncomfortable red chairs in front of Dr. Windu’s desk; an empty one is left for you on Obi-Wan’s right. And on Dr. Windu’s immaculate desk, a single sheet of paper with a few lines highlighted in yellow: you can only assume that it’s a hard copy of the reviews you read the night before.

“The reviews on that website came in. And we’ve got a problem, Ben. And it is sitting in the two chairs across from me.” You and Obi-Wan don’t even think to look at one another. Mace’s face softens and he actually smiles even though the lines in his forehead are frowning. “I’m coming to you not as your supervisor or colleague but as your friend. And Ive brought _you,_ ” he looks right at you and you squirm, “in here because I have a feeling this is about you.” He taps once on the highlighted comment before sliding it to you, indicating that he wants you to pick it up and read it.

You glance at Obi-Wan and he looks at you pointedly and you know to read this comment like you would the first time and not that you just read it in bed with him hours ago after making love three times before the morning arrived.

“Well?” Mace prompts you.

You read it out loud, voice catching at all the right places. Because no matter how you felt about Obi-Wan, no matter how entwined your hearts were into one another’s, something about verbalizing these words aloud and to the two others in the room activated all of the lettering on the page in front of you and made it real.

“Mr. Arcade has a sexual assault on his record; I don’t know how anyone would believe his word over a tenured professor and the young woman who reported him. This is clearly a case of gravely belated retaliation.”

“Be that as it may, we must still open an investigation. That includes you, too,” he looks at you again and you nod mutely. “Where I and an outside part will bring the two of you in for a series of questioning. The questions will be personal and they will be uncomfortable and invasive. Do you understand? Are there any questions?”

“Will she be protected by confidentiality protocols?” Obi-Wan asks at the same time that you ask your question:

“Will Professor Kenobi lose his job?”

“She will be. And he may not. If he hadn’t been awarded tenure, possibly. I doubt there will be a call for his removal, but it’s not wholly impossible.”

—

End of chapter.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which you and Obi-Wan decide to have a weekend staycation; he cooks for you; you play board games; and you play with each other in a new way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author Note: I forgot what day it was where we left off so we are just going to pretend that it was a Friday because I want them to spend the weekend together. Continuity? We don’t know her. Plotholes? We love her. 
> 
> Trigger Warnings: mentions of food and eating; unprotected piv sex; facesitting; oral sex (f receiving); so the usual shouting of 18+! smut! mature/explicit!

—

1

Once you’ve both left Mace’s office, Obi-Wan’s fingers fly to his beard and he worries at the hairs, that line between his forehead running deep with thought. “Can we go home early today? I’m going to cancel my lecture.”

“Yeah, that’s fine.” You notice just how close you’re standing to him only when a barrage of students force their way between the two of you, heading to their next class in a hurry. “Today was a short day at work for me; I don’t have to be back.” Once the wave of students are gone, you move closer to him again, your hand palming his bicep—his tattooed one, you think with a flush—soothingly. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Fine.” But you know its a lie and he knows you know its a lie. But its also a promise: I’ll tell you everything later. “I’m going to go print a sign and hang it up on the lecture hall. So the kids know the class is canceled.” His hand moves to the front pocket of his jeans and he fishes out his keys. No longer with his Hogwarts house keychain—you’d both agreed to stop reading the books together and get rid of the keyrings after you’d spent time online investigating the TERF receipts tied to the author. “Will you drive? Pull up to the front of the building and pick me up?” He slides his office key off the lot of them and hands you the rest, including the car key. And in this moment of profound trust, you feel a deep love for him. But also a twinge of sadness.

For Obi-Wan to not want to drive—or even be able to drive, by the looks of the way his hand shakes the keyring into your waiting palm—unsettles you, and a dipping nervousness takes over your lower belly. Your legs tremble at first, but now is the time to be strong for your partner. You receive the keys and head out to the parking garage after he presses a kiss into your hairline.

Once you’re away from the university, its like he can not only breathe again, but decompress with you. “I’m sorry darling. I was just nervous to stay in there any longer.” He says once he’s seatbelted himseld into the passenger seat.

“I understand.” You start the engine and he waits for you to pick the music, and he angles the vents towards you like always. “I was thinking. That it may be a good idea to just…disconnect this weekend.”

“Do you want to go to the cabin?” You reverse out of the spot, your arm wrapping around the seat he’s in like he’s done to you so many times before. Once you’ve straightened out to drive and pull your arm away, he catches your wrist and presses a quick kiss—seemingly without even thinking about it—onto your palm before it joins your other hand on the steering wheel.

“We can if you’d like. But I just thought it would be nice to kip out in a living room somewhere. Sort of an indoor camping trip? Play some games.”

“I would love that. Before we go home, would it bother you if we stop at my place really quickly? So I can grab a few things?” You ask at the stop sign that leads away from the university: you need to know which way to turn.

“Of course not. Not a bother. Never a bother.” He’s sitting with his legs pulled up into the seat, crossed like a pretzel, and his hands twisting his his lap.He’s got his shoes off; his socks are panda bears eating tacos.

Neither of you have said anything about how you’ve been referring to his house as ‘home’ as of late. But you do catch the small smile he makes beside himself every time you say it. Sometimes, he’ll even blush, or smiles so widely that he’ll hide his face behind both hands in embarrassment and it makes your chest feel like it will absolutely explode with your love for him.

You turn in the direction towards the house you share with your roommates.

He follows you to your room—nobody is home—and watches you pack several changes of clothes (too many for just a couple of nights, and this pleases him and excites him: this means you’ll be staying longer than the weekend) into a duffle bag. “Sorry to grab so much,” you murmur, digging out several small pairs of socks: he coos over the adorable printing of small animals and ice cream cones. “But you said you made space for me.”

“Yes!” And this is the first of his brightness you’ve seen all day. “Yes, please, bring whatever you’d like. I’ve made plenty of room for you. ” He starts poking around your things in your room excitedly, trying to find anything else to grab while he’s here to help you pack. His fingers trace the spines of the books on your shelves, and he pulls the ones out that he doesn’t have on his own shelves—you have a lot of titles in common. “Is there anything else you’d like to bring? I’ll carry it for you?”

“What about the record player? And some of the vinyl?”

“I would be delighted.” He kneels into the floor and closes the lid after securing the needle. He looks up at you where he’s made himself small in the floor, crouched over your collection. “Are we taking Winston?”

Winston is the small succulent that lives on your bookshelf. It didn’t have a name until Obi-Wan started referring to it as Winston one night that he snuck over to make you look at things on the internet with him.

“We can come back for Winston. This is enough for now.”

He gathers some albums and the record player and lays them gingerly on the bed so that he can grab the water squirt-bottle off one of the lower shelves on the book case and Obi-Wan spritzes Winston with water: something you’d forgotten to do today. “We’ll be back for you,” he promises the plant. Then to you, “Do you mind if we go to the grocery store? They ducklings are out of peas, and there’s a few things I need to get.”

“I don’t mind at all.”

—

2

You’re following him with the empty basket as he pokes around the produce. “What are you making this weekend?”

He whips around, dramatically, his hair falling dangerously close to his eyes and he looks at you over the top of his glasses. “It’s a surprise.”

“Can I have a guess?”

“Always. But you’ll never guess it, my dear.” Echoes, of his taunts from when you met for the second time. The old name business.

He drops the eggplants and different squashes into the basket and takes it from you. You watch how his bicep flexes and strains from under his tightly-fitted black t-shirt sleeve and feel weak.

He gets stuff to make home-made peanut butter cookies, and when pulling it off the shelf and tells you almost conspiratorially, “The trick is in the fork; I’ll show you later.”

Miss Carol is working the register on this day, he tells you. And its very quickly become one of your favorite things about Obi-Wan: that not only is he kind to those who work in the service industry, but that he genuinely likes them and talks to them regularly enough to not only share his life with them, but hear about theirs too.

“Obi!” The older woman all but coos when she sees him. He beams at her in response and she asks him if “little Fomo” is out of food again, and she asks if he has any new pictures to show her because she wants to see what a big boy he’s becoming.

Obi-Wan pulls his cellphone out od his back pocket and starts scrolling through his recent camera roll snaps. He tugs on your sleeve with his free hand and gently brings you into his side, “Miss Carol, this is my sweetheart.”

“I thought your face looked familiar, from one of his photos,” she tells you. She places her cheater glasses dangling from a thin gold chain around her neck to squint down at what Obi-Wan is showing her and she has a fit over how big the babies have gotten since she last saw them. She asks if Clark is still a bother and Obi-Wan grumbles out his affirmative.

“Obi told me why he named the duckling Fomo after you explained what that meant. I was tickled to death about that.”

“Miss Carol watches after the babies whenever I’m away,” he explains, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with the back of his hand, and you’ve never wanted nothing so desperately more than to grab his face and kiss him with the push of every corner of your soul, to taste him and all of the good in him that spills put so easily when you’re together. To do that, right here and in front of all of these people.

She finishes ringing the items up, “Are you making french onion soup for your sweeting, dearest?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, beaming with all of his teeth and she and you while thumbing his PIN number into the keypad once it prompts him. “And roasted vegetables.”

“That sounds so nice.”

“And cookies,” you say, grabbing one of the reusable bags he brought with you both: polar bears.

“I have to make something sweet for my sweetie,” he says, quite seriously, to Miss Carol before telling her goodbye and before she tells you what a pleasure it is to have finally met you.

—

3

Obi-Wan is fretting again, fingers lost in his beard, and running across his mustache, and frowning. He stops and looks at you almost expectantly. “I’m sorry, darling.”

“About what?”

“About all of this. Its so disruptive.”

But his anxiety doesn’t allow him to stop pacing, and you get up from the armchair and tug at the back of his flannel shirt when it looks like he may start pulling some of his hairs out. He finally stops and looks at you, a faint smile playing on his lips, “Look at you.” And his fingertips against your cheek, pressing small affection into your face. “What is it, sweetness?”

“Please calm down…I just want you to feel good. Remember, we’re disconnecting this weekend. Lets take a nap,” you suggest moving closer to him and pressing your palm flat against his chest.

“Do we have to get out of bed for the rest of the day?” He wraps his hand around yours and looks at you while he kisses the inside of your wrist before darting his tongue across the skin and breathing warmly into you, placing another open mouthed kiss against it. “Or tonight?” His fingers close around your wrist and he tugs you to him, your front mashed to his as his free arm wraps around your waist, pinning you to him and he relinquishes his hold on your wrist so your shaking fingers can begin to fumble his flannel’s buttons loose and then open. He’s not wearing an undershirt unlike usual and this excites you in a new way that makes you flush hot and let out a small sound of surprise. He watches you, with great interest, and closes his eyes when you press your nose into is golden red chest hair and inhale his scent before kissing him at the base of his throat.

“No,” you say against him, “we don’t have to get out of bed if we don’t want to.”

“I want to try something different,” he murmurs deftly against your mouth, his tongue grazing your lower lip in a lazy way. You grab his face and pull him closer into you, devouring him and swallowing his words, his breath inflating your lungs and his fingers sure and strong wrapping around the waistband of your panties and yanking them off—his body moving with the pull and tug down the length of your legs—with an elastic snap and aching creak like they’ve been torn. His hair like the color of changing leaves, falling into his eyes, and his eyes burning aquamarine through the layers wide with apology.

“I want you to taste you,” he shudders out, averting your gaze, “but I want you to. Be in my face.” Its awkward, the way he’s trying to tell you what he wants but also endearing and it thrills you to no end.

“Tell me, Ben.”

“I want you to fuck my face.”

You tug him close, and then lead him to lay on his back, against the pillows. He scoots down to be flatter while you sidle up his body. You stop and hover over his chest and your confidence ebbs away. “How do we do this?”

“Scoot closer,” he says quietly, and you do, his body slowly disappearing from under you until your knees are planted just over his shoulders.

You rest your palm on his chest, behind your back and he says in a near growl—a feral sound, really, “Don’t be afraid you’re hurting me, angel” he says, “You’re not hurting me; use my body to support yourself.”

“Is this good?” he asks, once you’re positioned, trying not to be embarrassed at the semi-awkward position. His breath hot against your inner thigh and you feel yourself clenching around nothing, feeling like you could start dripping right on his chest.

“Yes,” you say, and want to tell him that you feel ‘all shaky’, but its hard to speak.

“I want you just like this.” His palms are warm on your thighs and you shiver against him, and he catches your lips in his mouth in a soft kiss, just like he would on your mouth. “I love you, darling.” His hands are sure and firm on you, and you relax into him. And his hot mouth finds your center, his tongue immediately plunging into your folds, lapping and laving, and his soft moans pressed against your wet silk drives you to buck your hips against his face and he groans louder, a rumbling purr coming out from deep in his chest.

You lean backwards, pressing your hips more into his face, and your arm reaching back and back until your fingers curl around the base of his hard cock. Your thumb swipes at the precome leaking out the tip and you can’t stop the whimper that escapes from your throat. It always excites you to feel the evidence of his arousal in this simple drip, and your thumb presses soft circles over his velvet smooth cockhead and he groans into your folds, kissing you more fervently, tugging each lip into his mouth before pressing hit tongue flat into you, and then the tip of it flicking at your clit.

“Obi-Wan,” you cry out, gripping his hair with your free hand and grind harder into him. His fingers dig into your thighs, and you know his neat nails will leave small crescent divots, and he laps at you more urgently. “I want to feel you,” and you move to dip away from his face, but he won’t let you go—can’t let you go—at first, until he’s run the flat of his tongue and then the tip of it all throughout you. Then, his hands loosening around your legs, and moving up to your hips, and he’s helping you slide down his body, until you’re straddling his hips and can feel his cock fitting snugly into the groove between your thigh and outer labia. You press your palms flat against his chest to steady yourself, rocking your hips over the length of his cock, trying to soak it with your essence and with the slick his mouth has left all over you. His fingers trace up the length of his your neck until he’s cupping your face and pulling you in for a kiss and whispering against you, “I want you to taste yourself,” before plunging his tongue into your mouth and pressing his cock into your center in one fluid movement. You moan into each other’s mouths, and one of his arms wraps around your waist, catching you around the small of your back, and his palm spread out wide over it, pressing you down onto him and him, rocking his hips up into yours.

And him, telling you in the quiet way of his in between kisses, “Angel, please let me to show you just how much I am not willing to let you go.”

—

4

The next day, he takes you to Lush to meet “his friends” (the employees who help him find stuff); the plan is to make popcorn at home and play Scrabble with charcoal face masks on.

“This is my friend Ian.” Obi-Wan tells you when he lets you walk in front of him and into the store.

“Hello, Professor Kenobi.” Ian is a tall, blue haired person with a single rose-gold nose ring hoop. “Are you back for more face mask things?”

“Yes. Ian, this is my sweetheart.”

“Nice to meet you, Sweetheart.”

Obi-Wan is delighted. “Ian always recommends the best scents. He’s the one who showed me the rose jam and charcoal masks. We’re doing masks tonight, Ian, actually.”

“Right, sounds great.” Ian leads you both over to that section and Obi-Wan walks beside and behind you with his hand on the small of your back, pointing out the mountains of soap and chattering on in your ear about the scents, beaming over their names and ingredients, and marveling over the ones that come from the ocean.

“Like seaweed,” he tells you.

“Here is is, Professor Kenobi,” Ian says, slapping a small black jar into Obi-Wan’s hand. “Mask of Magnaminty”.

Is this why he always smelled like peppermint? you wonder to yourself as you watch him turn it over in his hands and then open it with a wide-eyed curiosity before shoving the jar under your nose. Yes, this is why he always smelled like that.

“It looks like guacamole, but it is not,” he tells you seriously. “Even though I’m sure its delicious.”

“It probably wouldn’t taste good,” Ian says. “Please don’t eat the face mask, Professor Kenobi.

—

5

You’re playing ‘truths’—like truth or dare, but just the truth part, and its intent is to learn fun or embarrassing things about one another—while you have their face masks slathered on and are starting up a game of Scrabble, the both of you spread out in front of the active fireplace. Grumbis is with you both: he’s holding Obi-Wan’s iPad that’s playing music. Even though it’s still the afternoon, you’re both in bare minimum ‘jim jams’, and stretched out in the floor. The way he plays this game has you both with all the tiles flipped over so all of the letters showing. And you just make whatever words you can think of and fit appropriately on the board. The goal is to use all the letters. It takes all afternoon.

The word you start off with is ‘butthole’.

“Ben.”

“Darling, please. We must establish a baseline. This is the only suitable one: this is something that everyone has at some point. It is the one true universal human experience.”

You tell him to tell you a truth.

“I don’t even like Moby Dick,” he confesses, fiddling with a blank Scrabble tile between his fingers. “I just wanted to read the longest book I could think of to you so I could spend more time with you.”

From ‘butthole’, you build upward, spelling out ‘throb’. From the ’t’, he makes ’trex’ (“Like the dinosaur,” he tells you, seriously, knowing that you find great enjoyment when he mansplains very obvious things to you). From the ‘u’ in ‘butthole’, you build ‘uterus’ going down.

“What’s your truth?” He asks, picking through the letters, trying hard to hide his grin for the next word: ‘grumbis’, ending with the ’s’ from ‘uterus’.

“I don’t remember anything that happened in Moby Dick. I just wanted to listen to your voice every night.” You dig through the letters. “That’s a proper noun. It’s not allowed.”

“Grumbis is a proper entity; he is allowed everywhere, even Scrabble boards.”

You play ‘booger’ next, with the ‘r’ ending in ‘grumbis’s. “Tell me another truth, Ben.”

He plays ‘help me’ going down from the ‘h’ in ‘butthole’. “Sometimes I wouldn’t be wearing any clothes at all when I read to you. You probably thought I just didn’t have a shirt on.” You flush with an overheated excitement.

From the ‘e’ in ‘butthole’, you spell ‘elephant’ going down.

“Cute,” he says. “Truth.”

“I would touch myself while listening to you over the phone.”

He drops one of the tiles and it scatters some of the played words. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose clumsily, looking at you with his burning eyes, trying to straighten the letters out. “Really?”

“I don’t think you’ve ever seen what you look like. Yes, really.”

He plays ‘sex’ from ’trex’. “That’s erotic.”

“I know.”

“Cheeky.”

“I know.”

“Your play, darling.”

“ _I know_.” You play ‘mayo’ from ‘grumbis’ with the ‘m’ going down. “What’s another truth?”

He plays ‘quote’ from ‘mayo’ with the ‘o’ going to the right. “I fucked myself in my office once because I couldn’t stop thinking of you.”

“I think you’re too honorable for that.”

“Apparently, I’m full of surprises, my dearest one.”

You shuffle your new tiles from one hand to the other and play ‘rimming’ from ‘throb’ going to the right.

“Gorgeous,” he says. “I’d love to try that one day.”

“Me, too,” you smile at him.

“Tell me,” he prompts you for another truth.

You play ‘hand job’ from the ‘h’ in elephant going to the right. “I never came as hard in my life as I did the night you fingered me at the lake.”

“Hmm,” he coos, looking at his letters and blushing, unable to look you in the eye. “I think about that night constantly.” He plays ‘ducks’ with the ‘d’ from ‘hand job’ going down. “You felt so good around my fingers, so warm.”

You play ‘booty’ with the ‘b’ from ‘hand job’ going down. “You tell me now.”

“Right now?”

“ _Now_.”

“I came in my pants that night because I could feel you come, and I’ve never felt someone do that to me before. It scared me. Because I knew I’d want it all the time.” He gives you a hard, and sincere look before playing his final word. It’s from left to right, using the ‘g’ in ‘booger’.

His final play is the word ‘marriage’. And he sits back, and he just looks at you, fingers in his stubble, stroking soft lines across his upper lip. And he just watches you.

—


	12. (Deleted Scene)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another time that our dear professor sneaks into Reader's room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 18+! Mature! Explicit!  
> Warnings: Biting, oral sex (f receiving), unprotected sex, oral sex (m receiving), professor kink, some dirty talk, cockwarming (in her mouth)

You’re reading a horror novel, and when the tapping comes at your window just after midnight you almost yelp. Instead you shine your phone’s flashlight against the glass and find Obi-Wan with his palms flat against the pane and looking at you like a lost puppy begging to be let into the warmth of your room. You move towards the window. 

“Where’s Grumbis?” You ask him, confused that he’s not handing him over first, sliding the window open so he can hoist himself through and into your bed. 

“He wasn’t allowed to come along tonight.” He sits on his knees, kind of crooked positioned on the lumpy pile of throw blankets he’d spend the last few weekends making you. He digs in his shorts’ pockets and pulls out things for you to lay on your bedside table: his keys; his phone (with a cracked screen again—you’d have to put another screen protector on it soon); empty mango Hi-Chew wrappers; and a small Zebra Cake, squashed inside of its cellophane wrapper (“That’s for you,” he tells you. “I thought you might want something sweet.”)

“Oh?” You ask, sitting all of the things on the table and turning the low lamp light on. “And why not?” You shift to your knees to face him and he paws at your shirt hem. 

“Because Im here to,” he glances over his shoulder to look at your bedroom door and squints at the knob. When he sees that its unlocked, he rolls off your bed and gingerly walks over to the door and locks it. He races back to your bed and throws all of his body weight onto it, making it bounce and creak. You slide to your side to face him. He presses his nose into your hair once everything calms and whispers, “Grumbis wasn’t allowed to tag along tonight because I’ve come here to fuck you.” A small kiss at your temple. “If thats all right.”

You feel yourself flush with a terrifying and wonderful excitement at the gruff but matter of fact way he’s said that. It always excited you to be with him intimately, but it was just different when he was in one of his feral moods and less sweet and tender. “That’s all right, but we have to be quiet. They’re all watching a movie in the living room.”

“Lucky for _you_ , _I_ am the quietest man alive.” 

_Says the man with no inside voice_ , you want to say but dont because he’s already tugging his shirt off, up and over his head, the layers falling thick and autumn-beautiful in the lamp’s soft glow. 

During the past week, you have loved each other soft with needy mouths and eager tongues and steady hands and fingers thrumming deep and reaching. An aching excitement tears through the slick veneer of arousal coating at your core and hammering in your chest when you know that he’s going to fuck you with his cock: hot and hard and heavy; straining against his thin shorts he’s worn over here tonight—without underwear, he hardly wears them—and stained damp with his own precome arousal. You want him to just fit his hips flat to yours and grind the taut underside tight and steady against your need, to further soak his shorts. But he won’t. He has other plans. And they involve tearing your sleepshorts away and pushing your legs wide open, his palms hot and tender on your inner thighs. He scoots closer, on his knees, and looks down at you with his chest heaving and his eyes wild. 

He takes his white t-shirt and tosses it up at you. “Just in case you need to cry out, and I’m not there to swallow it.” 

You give him an ‘are you serious’ kind of look, but hold it close to your chest just the same, glad to have his scent wash over you when you bring the fabric up to your nose: peppermint, and fresh laundry. 

His arched and sassy eyebrow tells you ‘yes, indeed: im quite serious’, and positions himself in front of you, tugging you closer to his face with his arms wrapped around your thighs. You can feel the hard in his biceps against you, and you shiver against him: you sometimes forget how strong he is, even though he doesn’t look it at times hidden under his layers and cardigan. 

He spreads your folds first with his chilly nose tracing a line all the way up to your clit where he nuzzles at it slowly, and you shiver against him at the cold contact, but then relax into the heat his mouth gifts you once he covers you with a kiss that works to catch all of you fully. You bring his shirt up to your mouth, balling it up, and moaning softly into it. You’re irritated that he was right that you’d need it. 

His mouth is quick: like it has a job to do, and it does: get you slick enough to fuck you as soon as he wants. No languid tongue work, but spit caught at the curling tip of his tongue and pressing it into your folds, into your entrance, mixing it with your own slick. This urgency, and the need to stay quiet excites you and if he could just brush the tip of his tongue over your clit a few times, you could—

He doesn’t let you come, and you’re all but eating his shirt at this point, biting down on it and exhaling heat and damp into it, burying your face into it to hide from him when he looks up at you with an innocent smugness, like he’s done nothing at all. He rolls off the bed and kicks out of his shorts and you peek over the top of his shirt bundle you’re clutching to look at him standing there, hands on his hips, considering how he wants to have you. His cock is glistening, precome dribbling from the tip and leaking a trail over the head’s ridge and to the underside. He takes himself in his hand and squeezes, his forearm straining to go slow, and strokes himself while looking down at you. 

“Get on your side.” He tells you. “Facing the wall.”

His weight dips your mattress, and he covers your belly with his warm hand and pulls you back to him until your back is flush against his chest. He presses a kiss where the back of your neck meets your shoulder and he bites down softly, softly cupping one of your breasts, and rutting hard against you from behind. He bites down a little harder and you cry out into his shirt, a little too loudly. 

His hand moves to cover your mouth and his nose tickles at your ear before he breathes out hot and heavy against you, teasing. “We have to be quiet, darling. They’re watching a movie out there. Or do you want them to know that I sneak over late at night to get my cock absolutely soaked by your perfect cunt?” You nod against his hand, and he nips at your ear. “You want them to know?” You nod against him again, and he feels you smiling against his palm, knowing that you’re playing with him. “Facetious thing.” He moves his hand from your mouth and catches your leg behind you knee to open you up to him, pressing his slick and hot cock in between your folds. He rocks the tip against your entrance and you grip at your sheets, clenching around him, already feeling the stretch from its long absence. 

You can’t stop the soft and dreamy, “ _Oh, baby,”_ that tumbles out: what you call him when you fuck yourself in your bed, in the shower, when thinking about him. “ _Obi…”_

His mouth finds your shoulder again and he bites down harder than ever, your attention on that new pain, ignoring the full length stretch of him pushing into your heated folds in one sure movement, buried fully. You’re gasping on air, almost gagging on it, unable to tell him how good he feels, when he starts fucking into you with a kind of furious longing you haven’t felt before. He’s showing you what he wants and how he wants to take it, his grip on your leg hard, and his strokes buried and deep, never withdrawing, and you feel yourself clench around him and coat him with a new sheen of heated warmth when he relentlessly pushes against the spot deep inside of you that only he’s ever been able to reach. His beard, scratching at your bare shoulder while he licks at your neck and covers it in sloppy kisses in between heated huffs of breath while he pants against you; his chest damp with sweat and pressing into your back, heating it and making you sweat, his dam chest hair against your smooth skin driving you wild. And he finally withdraws some, rocking into you with a pushing and steady rhythm, barely entering you, just enough for you to clench around his cock head, trying to will him to fill you again. You can’t even think enough to work your clit while he’s working his way into you, keeping you soaked and shaking against his front. 

“Oh, baby,” you start again, trying to will him in a different and whining way, “you’re so fucking big, Professor Kenobi. Please, fuck me, Professor, please.” 

And this does the trick. His grip locks your leg in place and he starts fucking into you with long strokes, hammering into you, the front of his thighs slapping against the back of yours, until hes pushing you away and onto your stomach and mounting you from behind with all of his weight on your back, fucking you into your mattress and blankets, all hot from the body heat, and him bending your arms until your palms are resting on the pillows next to your head, and him, pinning both of your wrists down with his strong hands. 

And his scratching beard and hot breath against your ear again, “You’ve been wanting to come all over your professor’s fat cock just like this for a long time haven’t you?” 

“Yes,” you muffle into the pillow, nodding into it and against him just in case he can’t hear. 

He lets go of one of your wrists and slides his hand under the front of your body to work your clit, almost roughly, sliding all around it and finding almost no purchase. “You’d better come, little one, because I’m about to and I won’t stop.”

His weight, his hot breath on your neck, on your ear, his relentless pace, and his fingers flying all over you. And you feel like you’ve wet yourself in a new way when you moan into your pillow in a strangled and helpless way, feeling yourself clench all over his length, all over how fucking big he feels inside of you and how completely he fills you. 

“I’m coming, Professor,” you cry out into the pillow, no longer caring—for real—if anyone else hears it because you can’t keep it inside any more. 

And his voice, softer than it’s been since he’s arrived, “I’m going to come, angel, where do you want it?”

You rise off of the pillows, still riding out your thrumming wave, “In my mouth.”

He groans over this, pulling out and stroking himself at the same pace he was fucking you, and relinquishes some of his weight so you can move to your back and so he can straddle your chest and cradle the back of your head while you take him into your mouth, tasting the both of you, and feeling like you could come again of the intimacy of it, letting him set the pace, your tongue running a strip up and over the underside, and sucking hard at the tip, gathering spit to make it wet for him, and his palm slams against the wall above your bed’s headboard, and he shouts—loudly—when he comes, coating the back of your throat in streams, his hips slowing , but not withdrawing, staying in the warmth of your mouth. You hold his hips in place, and bury him into your throat, to keep him nestled in your heat, your eyes closed and him looking down at you, catching his breath. 

He taps on one of your hands, signaling to let him go because he’s grown overly sensitive and needs you to release him. He clambers off of you, his awkwardness returned now that he’s had his release and a clearer head, and covers the front of your body with his, tugging at a throw blanket. You cover him with it, and he rests his face into the crook of your neck, warming himself against your drying sweat, and keeping you cozy instead of clammy. “We’re leaving out the window in the morning, darling. I daresay I don’t think I’ll be able to face your roommates again.” 

—


End file.
